The first thing a good IT company does at a new client is not fix anything. It goes looking. What it turns up in the first fortnight will tell you more about your business than any proposal ever will.
Nearly every time we take on a new business in Northland we find something nobody knew was running. An old server in a cupboard still holding staff records. A machine nobody had patched in over a year. A mailbox rule quietly moving invoices out of sight.
None of it was anyone’s fault. It just never got looked at, because the old arrangement was reactive — you rang when something broke, they fixed the thing that broke, and everything else stayed invisible.
That is the real thing you are buying when you hire an IT company properly. Not faster fixes. Someone looking before it breaks.
Most people hiring an IT company have done this at least once before and it did not go brilliantly, so here is what the first ninety days should actually look like.
Week one should be an audit, not a rescue
If a new provider opens by selling you hardware, be careful. The first fortnight should go on finding out what you actually have — every device, every user account, every licence you are paying for, and every system still running that nobody remembers.
We put every client machine into one monitoring system so the whole lot is visible in one place. Across our client base that is over a thousand devices. The value is not the number, it is that nothing is hiding — and nothing hidden means nothing that jumps out at you later, including the bill.
Expect a lot of questions in week one. Expect the answers to surprise you a bit.
You should get a list, not a lecture
At the end of that audit you should get something short and readable. A plain list of what is wrong, ranked by what matters, with the cost to fix it and what happens if you leave it.
Not a fat PDF nobody opens. Not a presentation full of red dials designed to frighten you into signing something bigger. A list.
Most owners find that list shorter than they feared. The stressful part was never the list — it was not knowing.
The handover from your old provider is the risky bit
This is where switching providers actually goes wrong, and it is worth knowing before you start.
The danger is not the technology. It is the keys. Domain names, Microsoft 365 admin access, the login for your website, the account with your internet provider — these are often sitting in an old provider’s name rather than yours. If nobody chases them down properly you can end up locked out of your own systems months later, usually at the worst possible moment.
A good provider maps all of that before anything moves, gets ownership transferred into your business name, and does the cutover outside your working hours. Ask specifically how they handle it. If the answer is casual, that is your warning.
Owning it and hosting it are two different things. Your domain name belongs to you. So does your Microsoft tenancy and your data. That does not change when you hire someone.
What we do take over is the hosting of the domain — the DNS records that point your website and your email at the right place. You still own the name. We just hold the controls and make the changes.
That is deliberate. Those records are the one place where a single wrong entry takes down your website and your email at the same time, and it is almost always someone changing a setting in good faith who does it. Keeping them in one set of hands means nobody wipes it out by accident.
So ask any provider two questions: who owns the domain, and who touches the records. The answers should be you, and them.
What you are actually paying for each month
The monthly fee confuses people, so here is the honest version. You are paying for three different things bundled together:
- The help desk — someone answers when a staff member cannot print.
- The watching — patching, backups, monitoring, security alerts. The work you never see and only notice when it stops.
- The thinking — someone who knows your business well enough to tell you what is coming in eighteen months.
In our experience the cheap quotes have usually dropped the second and third one. That is why they are cheap. It is not a rip-off, but you should know which you are buying, because the watching is the part that stops the expensive incidents.
Ask for the price per user per month, ask exactly what sits inside it, and ask what falls outside it and gets billed hourly. A straight answer to that third question tells you most of what you need to know about a provider. If you want ballpark numbers first, we have written up what managed IT support actually costs in NZ.
Local matters — but not for the reason you think
People assume local means someone can drive out when a machine dies. That is real, and it counts. But honestly, most of what we do gets done remotely and faster than anyone could drive.
The real value of local is understanding what your business actually looks like. A transport yard in Whangārei with drivers on phones all day has different problems to a professional services office with everyone on a laptop. Someone who knows the region and the industry asks better questions — and asks them before they sell you anything.
So ask who else in your industry they look after. Ask for a name you can ring.
Three questions worth asking before you sign
- “If someone was sitting in our email right now, how would you know?” Not which tools they sell — who actually reads the alerts, and how quickly you would hear about it. Tools nobody is watching are decoration.
- “What happens in the first ninety days, week by week?” A provider who has done this properly will have a straight answer. One who has not will talk in general terms about partnership.
- “If we leave in two years, what do we walk away with?” The answer should be everything, without a fight. Ask it early, while they still want your business.
Where to start
You do not need to commit to anything to find out where you stand. The most useful first step is the smallest one — an honest look at what you have running today.
We have made that easy: a free Cyber Readiness Self-Check you can run yourself in a couple of minutes. It runs you against SMB1001 — a tiered cyber-security standard built for small and medium businesses — and hands back your gaps in plain English. Free, and nobody rings you afterwards.
If you want the longer version of how to weigh providers up, we have written it out here: How to choose an IT provider in Northland.
Or just give us a call on 09 222 7770. We will start with the small version, not the big one.