Stories from the shop
What partnership looks like when it is not a brochure word.
Real engagements, told by the people who did the work. Names withheld where clients prefer it; the problems, and the fixes, are exactly as they happened.
The building burned down. The server was still running.
A spark in an outlet took the building. Smoke, then the fire department's water, then the ceiling came down on the server. It was still live.
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Out of business for two weeks. Insured again when it was over.
A threat actor sat inside the network for weeks, then deleted every backup and encrypted everything at once. We got involved in week three.
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Ten inches of rain in three hours. Nothing went down. Ever.
The lowest building in the business park took the water. The rack was tall enough, the infrastructure was untouched, and the systems never stopped.
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Their email had been down for two weeks. We had it running the day after they signed.
Their provider stopped answering the phone. We were standing in their office forty-five minutes after they called.
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Their outgoing provider switched off their phones at eight in the morning.
The incumbent sent a bogus five-figure invoice on the way out. When it was not paid, the phones went dead on a Tuesday.
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The stolen computers came back online, and we were watching.
Someone broke into an office and took the machines. Our software was still on them, so when one was plugged in, it reported home.
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They carried the backup drives to a bank vault for years. The drives were empty.
Staff swapped external drives and walked them across the street to a safety deposit box. The jobs had been erroring the whole time.
Read the storyIn 2019 we closed a door nobody was asking us to close. In 2020 that turned out to matter.
Remote access was running over open ports with nothing but a password in front of it. We replaced it across the client base a year before anyone needed to work from home.
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Their server died at half past eleven at night. Nobody at the company noticed.
Two people saw the alert outside on-call hours. They brought the disaster recovery server up together, and the business opened as normal.
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A second host, a backup server, and a recovery plan with a time on it
Scoping and building full disaster recovery for a client, with the gear configured in Pell Lake before it ever shipped.
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The backup drives were too small. Nobody had checked in years.
A disaster recovery assessment that found the backup could no longer hold the business, and fixed it before it mattered.
Read the storyEvery laptop managed, every login checked, without anyone noticing
Rolling out Intune and conditional access across a client's fleet so a stolen laptop is an inconvenience and a phished password is a dead end.
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AI policy and SEC compliance for a financial services firm
A written AI policy, a compliance program, and Copilot rolled out without the auditor flinching.
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Three companies, one accounting system, nineteen years of records
Three IT firms could not agree on a plan. We wrote one, merged the books, then moved everyone under one roof.
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Seven versions of QuickBooks, three companies, and a building move at the same time.
Two acquisitions, each with its own systems, one of them two decades old. We got everyone onto one, during a move.
Read the storyMerging four agencies into one, without losing a renewal
An independent agency absorbed several smaller ones. Each came with its own systems. Here is how they became one.
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The cross-town move, on time and under budget
Multiple vendors, one coordinator, and a move-in day where the phones rang at the right address.
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A new shop, then a new office, planned from the PDF of the drawings
Where the data drops go, what the server room needs, and whether to trench fibre or shoot a wireless link across the yard.
Read the storyGrowing through acquisition: a roadmap that unified five offices
As a client grew by buying companies, Pete set the technical vision: less dependence on servers, unified file shares between regions, one way of working.
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Eleven offices, one standard, and somebody local in every one.
Remote locations across the country, opened one at a time, each with a vendor bench established before the doors open.
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They thought they had twenty servers. They had forty-one.
A merger left an environment nobody had touched in years. An inventory found double what anyone expected. Eighteen months later it was four.
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Three trades, one bid, one job number.
Electrical, plumbing and HVAC all bid the same building and each arrived with its own systems. Now every job has one number and one folder.
Read the storyTwenty years of files, no retention policy, and a bill nobody had added up
We built the reporting that showed a firm what it was paying to store data it was not allowed to throw away, and what it could.
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One department, one system, no more sticky notes
Designing a small workflow system to keep a client's department organized, so nothing depends on one person's memory.
Read the storyDesigning the cloud plan so clients anywhere get the same service
How Midwest IT built its cloud services offering, and what it means for a client who is not down the road.
Read the storyThe ERP was running on a desktop PC. The vendor said that was fine.
We disagreed, in writing, and stayed on the vendor until the system was where it belonged.
Read the storyGreat Plains to a modern ERP without losing a month
An end-of-life accounting system, a vendor deadline, and a migration scheduled around the client's quarter instead of the vendor's calendar.
Read the storyGetting ahead of a vendor forcing everyone off premises
The project accounting vendor set a deadline. We set a better one.
Read the storyA hotel's ERP upgrade and a wireless network that finally holds
Multiple vendors, a property-wide infrastructure upgrade, and an ERP cutover the front desk barely noticed.
Read the storyNobody called us. The circuit was still down on Saturday morning, and it did not sit right.
A firewall cooked in a room nobody had thought about. An account manager who could not leave it alone, and a tornado on the drive out.
Read the storyA marina, a hotel, a pool and a restaurant, ready for the Fourth of July
One wireless network across the whole complex, designed for the busiest weekend of the year instead of a quiet Tuesday.
Read the storyTablets in the field, plans in hand, and nothing lost when one goes in the mud
Mobile device management for a contractor whose crews live on tablets and hotspots.
Read the storyThey could not get into their own network, and their old IT company stopped answering.
A hotel arrived with no administrative credentials and equipment hidden above the ceiling tiles. Three phases to get control back.
Read the storyA new client's first sixty days
Transition prep, discovery, hardware built in the shop, kick-off, check-in, each logged as its own ticket. Nobody wings it.
Read the storyWe got a quote wrong by ten thousand dollars. Here is what we did about it.
Server prices moved under us, twice. The client had been badly treated by previous vendors and signed anyway.
Read the storyTalk to a partner, not a sales script.
Tell us what is going on. A partner will call you back the same business day, look at what you have, and tell you honestly whether we are the right fit. No pricing pressure, no pitch deck.