The work that makes everything else work — here's what the first 30 days actually look like.
Most managed IT conversations focus on the ongoing relationship: response times, what's included, pricing. The part that gets less airtime is what happens between signing the agreement and the day everything is running the way it should. That transition period is where a lot of MSP relationships quietly fail — not because the ongoing service is bad, but because the handoff was done wrong. Here's how we do it.
Before any contract is signed, we do a plain-English discovery conversation — not a sales pitch, a diagnostic. We want to understand what you're running, what's been frustrating, what compliance requirements apply, and whether we're actually the right fit for your environment. If we're not, we'll say so.
This conversation also sets the baseline for onboarding scope. A 10-person professional services firm on Microsoft 365 has a very different onboarding than a 40-person medical practice running a practice management system with HIPAA documentation requirements.
Day one of active onboarding starts with a full audit of your environment. We deploy our RMM agent across every managed device, giving us immediate visibility into what's in your environment, what condition it's in, and where the problems are — including the ones you didn't know existed.
What we're looking at: every endpoint (age, OS version, patch status, disk health, existing security software); network (firewall configuration, switch/AP inventory, VPN setup, internet redundancy); Microsoft 365 (user list, license types, MFA status, security defaults, email filtering); backup status (what's being backed up, how often, where it's stored, when it was last tested); and vendor inventory (internet providers, line-of-business applications, hardware warranties, domain/SSL renewals).
By the end of week one, we have a complete picture of your environment and a prioritized list of issues.
The audit almost always surfaces something — usually several somethings. Devices with no endpoint protection. Accounts with no MFA. A backup that hasn't run in six weeks. A firewall with factory-default credentials. Critical patches missing on a server deferred for months.
Week two is remediation: we work through the priority issues, brief you on what we found and what we fixed, and flag anything that requires a budget conversation. This is also when we deploy EDR across managed devices, configure the backup environment to our standards, and apply security hardening to your Microsoft 365 tenant.
Most businesses have no documentation of their IT environment — not because they were negligent, but because no one ever wrote it down. We build it: network diagrams, vendor contact list with account numbers, device inventory with warranty status, user access map, and recovery procedures. This documentation lives in our systems and is available to you. If you ever leave NerdSquad — which we'll make as easy as possible — you take your documentation with you.
We introduce ourselves to your team — not just the owner or office manager, but the people who will actually call us when something breaks. They get a rundown of the roughly ten ways to reach us, what to expect when they do, and what a ticket priority level means in practice.
We also set up monitoring alerts, escalation paths, and maintenance windows specific to your business — the hours we can push patches, the systems that need advance notice before we touch them, any seasonal considerations. See our article on what ticket priorities mean for how we route issues once you're live.
By day 30, your environment is monitored, your backups are running and tested, your endpoints are protected, your critical vulnerabilities are remediated, and your team knows how to reach us. The ongoing relationship begins.
About 90 days in, we schedule a quarterly business review — a structured conversation about what's happened, what's coming up, and whether anything in your environment needs to change. It's not a formality. It's how we stay ahead of your needs instead of reacting to them.
For a sense of what the first 90 days look like in practice, see our managed IT case study. For industry-specific onboarding considerations, see our articles on healthcare IT support and financial services IT support.