Your First IT Provider at 10 Employees: What Changes

This is a composite scenario. It represents a typical engagement, assembled from patterns we see across many businesses. It does not describe any specific client.

The situation

Picture a service business in Gatineau with about 10 people: a handful of technicians in the field, two people in the office running schedules and invoices, and an owner who has never once thought of themselves as "the IT department," even though that is exactly what they have been since the company started. Whoever set up the first computer is still the one who resets the Wi-Fi password, orders replacement laptops, and calls the printer company when the machine jams. It was manageable at three people. At 10, it is not.

There is one server in the back office, old enough that nobody fully remembers why it does what it does, only that a piece of scheduling software depends on it and nobody wants to be the one who finds out what breaks if it goes down. Backups run every night, or at least the light on the box blinks the way it is supposed to. Nobody has ever tried to restore a file from one to check.

The breaking point

The moment that pushed the owner to act was not a disaster. It was an ordinary Tuesday. A technician's laptop would not connect to the shared calendar, so the day's jobs had to get texted around instead. The office computer that runs invoicing froze mid-month-end, and nobody knew if the last save had gone through. None of it was catastrophic. All of it landed on the owner, at 9 p.m., after a full day of actual work, because there was nobody else to call.

The real risk was not the printer or the calendar. It was the one aging server nobody understood, backed by a backup nobody had tested, running software the business could not operate without. If that box failed on a Monday, the honest answer to "how long until we are back up" was "we do not know." That is not a technology problem so much as a business risk sitting quietly in a back room, waiting.

The owner had put off getting outside help for years, mostly out of the assumption that it meant learning a whole new system, or worse, needing to understand the technology well enough to manage the relationship. Ten people is not enough to justify a full-time IT hire, but it is exactly enough that the owner's time spent fixing Wi-Fi is time not spent running the business.

The first 30 days

What made the difference was learning that none of it required the owner to become technical. The onboarding does not ask a business owner to understand networking, backups, or servers; it asks for access, and the rest is on us.

Week one, we take an inventory: every device, every login, every piece of software, including the one nobody remembers configuring. Week two, we get the aging server properly backed up and, for the first time, we actually test the restore, instead of trusting a blinking light. Week three, monitoring goes live across every workstation, quietly, in the background. Week four is a plain-language review: what we found, what we fixed, what still needs attention, none of it assuming the owner knows what an EDR agent or a domain controller is.

We laid out the same week-by-week plan, in plain terms, on our onboarding page, because a business owner should be able to read exactly what will happen before agreeing to any of it.

Where they are today

The company landed on our Essential plan, $95 per user per month. Ten users: 10 times $95 is $950 a month, before tax. (Even a smaller crew would hit the plan's $595 monthly minimum before the per-user math takes over, so the floor is not really a factor at this size.) Essential includes a 4-hour response time during business hours and monitored backups on every machine, month to month, with no multi-year contract locking anyone in.

The owner still knows more about the business's computers than most owners do; that does not go away. What changed is that resetting a password at 9 p.m. is no longer their job. Neither is wondering whether the backup actually works. If something breaks, there is a ticket and a number to call, not a mental note to deal with it after the last job of the day.

We have written what managed IT costs across the full range of business sizes. The short answer for a team of 10 is the Essential plan, and the math above is exactly how we get there.

If this sounds familiar

If you are the person who resets passwords, orders equipment, and worries about the server nobody else understands, on top of running the business itself, that is the exact gap this plan is built for. You do not need to know the technology to hand it off, only someone who documents it, tests the backups, and answers the phone in four hours or less.

If you want to see what the first 30 days would look like for your team, book the 30-minute call. No obligation, and no need to already understand what is running on that server in the back.

This is a composite scenario. It represents a typical engagement, assembled from patterns we see across many businesses. It does not describe any specific client.