01 Lands on: whoever built it
A spreadsheet is running the company
Quotes, stock, scheduling, all in one file that one person understands. It works until that person is on holiday, and it silently caps how big you can get.
No IT department, and the decisions keep landing on you.
For companies of ten to a hundred and fifty people. We take on the technology decisions and build the tools, at a fixed fee, without you hiring anyone. And we hand it back documented.
Read this before anything else
We are not the people who fix your laptop
In the US, "outsourced IT" usually means a managed service provider: helpdesk, device fleet, patching, mail. We do none of that, and a good MSP will do it better and cheaper than we would.
What we take on is the layer above it. Which system to build and which to buy. Whether that migration is worth doing this year. Why the vendor invoice tripled and what your options actually are. Whether the backup that runs every night could survive being restored. These are the questions an IT department answers, and they are the ones that cost real money when nobody owns them.
Plenty of companies need both, and the two sit together fine. But if what you are looking for is someone to answer the phone when a printer stops, we would rather tell you now than take a discovery call to get there.
What this usually looks like
Four symptoms, and none of them look urgent.
That is exactly why they persist. Nothing here is on fire, so nothing here gets scheduled, and the cost accumulates quietly in everyone's week.
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- 02 Lands on: you
Nobody owns the decisions
Vendor renewals, a migration nobody scheduled, a licence nobody can explain. The questions land on whoever is nearest to a keyboard, usually a finance or operations lead who did not sign up for it.
- 03 Lands on: operations
The same data is entered three times
The CRM does not talk to the accounting system, which does not talk to the operational tool. Everyone has learned to live with the double entry, which is why nobody costs it.
- 04 Lands on: nobody
You cannot tell if the backups work
Something runs at night. Whether it could actually be restored has never been tested. This is the single most common finding when we open the hood.
Four things, and not one of them is anybody's job. That is the whole problem, and it is not solved by working harder.
What you get, concretely
The function, not the headcount
- Decisions
Someone senior who owns the technology calls with you: build or buy, migrate or renegotiate, which vendor to keep. Written down, with the reasoning, so the decision survives the person who made it.
- Delivery
When something has to be built, we build it rather than write a specification and hand you a shortlist of agencies. That is the difference between advice and accountability: our recommendations have to survive their own implementation.
- Handover
Documentation, one of your people trained, every credential in your name. Designed at the start of the engagement, not offered as a favour at the end. You can replace us without a crisis, which is the only meaningful test of whether it was done properly.
If what you need is narrower, the individual pieces are on the services page: fractional CTO for the leadership alone, custom software for a single build, technical due diligence if you first want to know what you actually have.
The questions we actually get
Five answers, including two that send you elsewhere.
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Is this managed IT services? Will you run our helpdesk?
No, and this is the most important line on the page. We do not run helpdesks, device fleets, workstation imaging, printers or mail hosting. Those are managed service provider jobs, they are real jobs, and a good MSP will do them better and cheaper than we would. What we take on is the layer above: what to build, what to buy, what to migrate, which vendor is overcharging you, and whether the thing you are about to sign will still make sense in two years. Many of our clients have both. If you only need one and it is the helpdesk, hire an MSP, and we will happily say so on a call rather than stretch to fit.
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We are twenty people. Is that too small?
That is squarely the right size. Ten to a hundred and fifty people is where this makes the most sense: large enough that the tooling decisions genuinely cost money when they go wrong, too small to justify a full-time technology executive. Below ten people the honest answer is usually a short assessment and a couple of well-chosen off-the-shelf tools, and we will tell you that.
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What happens if we later hire someone internally?
Then the arrangement has worked and it should end. Every engagement produces documentation and trains at least one person on your side, specifically so that a new internal hire inherits a system they can run rather than a black box with our phone number on it. We have done exactly this handover before, to an internal product owner, and treated it as the deliverable rather than a loss.
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How much of your time do we actually get?
It depends on the engagement, and it is written into the contract rather than left as an availability promise. What is not on offer is unlimited reactive access, because that is how a small firm quietly degrades every client at once. We cap how many engagements run in parallel, contractually, and turn work down rather than dilute what is already committed.
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We are in the US and you are in Paris. Does that work?
Our afternoon is your morning, which is real overlap for standups and decisions rather than a courtesy window. The cost is that a late-afternoon question on your side is answered the next morning. For scheduled leadership work that is usually fine. If you need someone reachable at 4pm Pacific for operational incidents, an MSP on your timezone is the better answer, and it also happens to be the thing we do not do.
Next step
Twenty minutes, no proposal attached.
Describe what is landing on your desk that should not be. We will say plainly whether this is the right shape of help, and if an MSP or an internal hire would serve you better, that is what you will hear.