Consultancies, agencies, architects, engineers, recruiters, advisers — businesses that sell expertise and are judged on responsiveness. Your IT should make you faster than your competitors, not explain why the proposal went out late.
Professional services firms feel IT problems differently. There’s no warehouse or production line to hide behind — when a consultant can’t open the deck an hour before the pitch, or a director is fighting the VPN from a client’s boardroom, the cost lands directly on fee-earning time and reputation. Most firms we meet don’t have a technology problem so much as an accumulation problem: Microsoft 365 that grew organically until nobody knows where anything lives, laptops bought in batches and configured by whoever was free, and access that has only ever been added, never reviewed.
Meanwhile your clients have started asking pointed questions. Security schedules in contracts, data-processing agreements, questionnaires before you’re allowed near their data. For a firm that trades on professionalism, “we’re not sure” is not an available answer.
Where professional services clients lean on us hardest.
Teams and SharePoint reorganised so files have one home, sharing is controlled, and new projects start tidy — instead of a decade of “we’ll sort it later”.
Senior help, fast, from people who understand that “my laptop won’t start” an hour before a pitch is a business problem, not a ticket priority debate.
A defensible baseline with the evidence to match — so contract security schedules and client questionnaires get confident answers instead of nervous ones.
The repetitive internal work — onboarding checklists, approvals, reporting — automated with the Microsoft tools you already own.
Three principles that shape every firm we look after.
Laptops that behave the same in the office, at home and on client sites; files and calls that follow the person; security that doesn’t care where anyone is sitting. No VPN folklore.
A new consultant’s laptop, accounts, phone and project access ready the morning they start — and a leaver’s access gone the day they don’t. Churn is normal in professional services; chaos doesn’t have to be.
When a client’s procurement team sends the security annexe, you answer from documented reality — controls, certifications, evidence — and win the work instead of stalling it.
Yes — it’s one of the most common jobs we do, and it’s fixable without drama. The approach is architecture first: agree how the firm actually works (clients, projects, departments), design a structure to match, migrate content in stages, and put guardrails on so it stays tidy — controlled sharing, sensible defaults for new projects, ownership that’s clear. What doesn’t work is another “tidy-up day”. Structure plus guardrails is what lasts.
Ready for their first morning — laptop configured, accounts live, the right project and client access, phone and Teams working. The trick isn’t heroics the night before; it’s a defined joiner process where HR tells us a start date and everything else follows automatically. The same discipline runs in reverse: when someone leaves, access is revoked the same day, and their files and mail are handed over properly rather than orphaned.
Typically: MFA everywhere, managed and encrypted devices, controlled access to their data, tested backups, an incident-response arrangement, and increasingly a recognised certification — Cyber Essentials is the common ask at SME scale. What they’re really testing is whether your answers sound specific or vague. We put the controls in place, keep the evidence current, and help you answer security schedules truthfully — which turns procurement from a hurdle into a differentiator.
It will if it’s designed to — growth only hurts when every new hire is a bespoke project. We standardise the building blocks (a defined laptop build, a joiner/leaver process, a licensing structure that scales, file architecture with room to grow) so adding ten people is routine rather than a scramble. And because we’re engineers rather than salespeople, scaling advice is about what you need next, not what we’d like to sell next.
An IT company that follows up problems and comes back with solutions?? This is mad!
Career feedback from our founder’s client work. Identities withheld to respect confidentiality. References available on request.
A straight conversation about how your firm works, where the friction is, and what clients now expect from your security — and how we’d sort both.