Know what to fix first.
We look at everything your business runs and write down what we find. You get an inventory, a risk list ranked worst first, and a plan with a cost against each line.
Fixed scope, fixed price, and a date it finishes on.
What this is
An assessment of what your business actually runs, done once, over a few weeks. Not a retainer, not a sales process, and not a discovery call with a proposal at the end of it.
Most firms have never had anyone write all of it down. The things that go wrong are almost never exotic: an account nobody closed, a backup nobody tested, a domain registered to someone who left in 2021. You cannot decide what to spend money on until somebody has listed them.
Seven things, in the order they tend to cause trouble.
What we look at
- Accounts and access
- Who can reach what, who has administrator rights, and whether anyone who left still has a way in.
- Backup and recovery
- What is backed up, how far back it goes, and whether anyone has restored from it. We check by restoring something.
- Mail and domains
- Who owns your domain, where it is registered, and whether your mail records are set so your invoices arrive and nobody can send mail pretending to be you.
- What is exposed
- Which of your systems can be reached from outside, deliberately or otherwise, and what sits behind them.
- Licences and spend
- What you pay for monthly, who is using it, and what you are paying for twice or not using at all.
- Suppliers and contracts
- Who you are tied to, for how long, what the notice period is, and what leaving would actually involve.
- The single point of failure
- What happens on the day the one person who knows how everything works is not available. In most firms this is the largest risk on the list and the least written down.
Documents, not a slide deck. Yours to keep either way.
What you get at the end
An inventory
Every account, system, domain, subscription and supplier, written down in one document. Most firms have never had one.
A ranked risk list
Worst first, in plain sentences, with what would actually happen in each case rather than a severity colour.
A costed plan
What to do about each line and roughly what it costs, separated into what to do now, what to do this year, and what to leave alone.
A walkthrough
We take you through all three and answer questions. Not a slide deck presented at you.
We would rather you read this from us than work it out on your own halfway through the report.
We have a conflict of interest
We also sell the work. An advisor who sells the implementation has a reason to recommend the implementation, and that is exactly what we are. Nobody in this market says it, which does not make it less true of them.
- The report says what to fix. It does not say who should fix it, and it is written so that anyone competent could pick it up and quote against it.
- Any price from us for the work comes separately, and after you have the report, not inside it.
- You can take the whole thing to another supplier, including one of ours. It is yours. That is the point of paying for it.
- Nothing in the assessment is conditional on hiring us for anything afterwards.
Optional, and never a condition of the assessment.
Keeping us afterwards
Some firms want someone to keep asking the questions once the list exists. A retained advisor does that, and does not touch the keyboard. If what you actually want is someone running the systems day to day, that is IT support and it is a different service.
- A standing review of the risk list, so it is a live document rather than a report that ages in a drawer.
- We read the contracts and quotes you are sent, and tell you plainly what they commit you to.
- A budget for the year ahead, and a straight answer when something is not worth buying.
- Someone to ring before you make a decision, rather than after it has gone wrong.
Two quite different buyers, and the assessment is the same either way.
Who this is for
Small firms with nobody looking after any of this, who need to know what they are sitting on before they spend anything.
And larger organisations that already have IT staff or a supplier, and want someone independent to look at it. That is not a criticism of whoever is there now. Anyone running a system every day stops being able to see it, which is why the review comes from outside.
Tell us roughly how many people and what you run, and we will tell you what the assessment would cost.
Find out what you are sitting on
Describe your setup in your own words: how many people, what you use for email, and anything that has gone wrong recently. We will scope the assessment and give you a fixed price before it starts.