After you sign, we spend roughly the first month auditing your environment, fixing the urgent problems, documenting everything and introducing ourselves to your team. Here's what each stage typically looks like.
Most managed IT conversations focus on the ongoing relationship: support, what's included, how the plans work. Less attention goes to the stretch between signing the agreement and the day everything runs the way it should. That handoff is where many provider relationships go wrong, so we treat it as its own project.
Before any agreement is signed, we have a plain-English discovery conversation. It's a diagnostic, not a sales pitch. We want to understand what you're running, what's been frustrating, which compliance requirements apply and whether we're the right fit. If we're not, we'll tell you.
This conversation also sets the scope of onboarding. A 10-person professional office on Microsoft 365 looks very different from a 40-person medical practice running a practice management system with HIPAA documentation requirements. It's also where we talk through which plan fits: Endpoint Starter (business hours, Monday through Friday), Endpoint Pro (extended hours, seven days a week) or Endpoint 360 (24/7, including weekends and holidays).
Active onboarding starts with a full audit. We install our remote monitoring and management (RMM) agent on every managed device, which shows us what's in your environment, what condition it's in and where the problems are, including the ones you didn't know about.
What we review:
By the end of the first week, we have a clear picture of your environment and a prioritized list of issues.
The audit almost always turns up something. Computers without endpoint protection. Accounts without multi-factor authentication (MFA). A backup that quietly stopped running. A firewall still using factory-default credentials. A server missing critical patches.
Week two is remediation. We work through the priority issues, brief you on what we found and what we fixed, and flag anything that needs a budget conversation. This is also when we deploy endpoint detection and response (EDR), configure backups to our standards and harden your Microsoft 365 tenant.
Many businesses have little or no documentation of their IT, usually because nobody ever had time to write it down. We build it: network diagrams, a vendor contact list with account numbers, a device inventory with warranty status, a user access map and recovery procedures. The documentation is yours. If you ever move to another provider, it goes with you. If you're coming to us because the person who held all of that knowledge just left, see what to secure when your IT person quits for the steps to take right away.
We introduce ourselves to your team, not just the owner or office manager but the people who will actually contact us when something breaks. They learn how to reach us (phone, email, the support portal, portal chat or their account contact), what to expect when they do and how ticket priorities work.
We also set up monitoring alerts, escalation paths and maintenance windows that fit your business: when we can apply patches, which systems need advance notice and any seasonal considerations.
At this point your environment is typically monitored, backups are running and tested, endpoints are protected, critical vulnerabilities are fixed and your team knows how to reach us. Larger or more complex environments can take longer, and we'll tell you up front if yours will. From here, ongoing support runs under the industry-leading SLA in your service agreement.
Around the three-month mark, we hold the first quarterly business review: a structured conversation about what has happened, what's coming and what in your environment should change. That's how we plan ahead instead of reacting.
For an illustration of how the first 90 days often unfold, see our example of the first 90 days of managed IT. For industry-specific considerations, see our pages on IT support for medical and dental practices and IT for financial advisers and wealth managers.
Already a client? Call (239) 465-0079 or submit a ticket. If something is down, call so we can start right away.
Not a client yet? NerdSquad Managed IT Services is a Managed Service Provider (MSP) based in Naples, Florida. We support businesses onsite across Southwest Florida and remotely nationwide. Book a discovery call or call (239) 465-0079.
Related: Managed IT services and plans