(Process)  Onboarding & beyond

Four steps, no mystery.

Most of our client relationships are measured in decades. That only happens if the first month is honest. Here's exactly what it looks like.

i.
Step one · Week 0

Conversation, not a pitch.

45–60 minutes · no obligation

We start with a working call. No slide deck, no MSP bingo. One of our senior engineers (not a salesperson) asks about what's actually broken — the old firewall, the password policy nobody follows, the ticket queue that never closes.

By the end of the call you should have a clear sense of whether we're the right fit, an informal shortlist of things we'd change first, and zero obligation to go further.

You walk away with
  • A senior engineer's honest take on your current state
  • Ballpark pricing before we sign anything
  • A written summary of what we discussed
ii.
Step two · Weeks 1–2

Technical audit.

On-site & remote discovery

If we both want to continue, we run a discovery engagement across your stack: identity, endpoints, servers, network, backup, SaaS footprint, and documentation. It takes about two weeks and it's the same process whether you end up hiring us or not.

What you get at the end is a written assessment — findings ranked by risk and cost-to-fix, in plain English, with dollar estimates. Our clients have used this document to get budget approved, get insurance, and get auditors off their back.

Deliverable
  • Written technical assessment (20–40 pages)
  • Risk-ranked findings with plain-English explanations
  • Cost-to-fix estimates you can take to your CFO
  • 90-day quick-wins list and 12-month roadmap
iii.
Step three · Weeks 2–4

Transition, no downtime.

Parallel onboarding, not cutover

The handoff is where most MSP engagements go sideways — and where we spend most of our process discipline. We onboard in parallel with your current IT provider (or internal IT person), not after them.

Documentation, credential rotation, MDM enrollment, monitoring agents, security tooling, backup agents, and communication channels all go in before anything old goes away. Your team shouldn't notice the switch happened until we tell them it did.

Inside the transition
  • Full documentation of your environment
  • Credential rotation & vault handoff
  • Endpoint management (Jamf/Intune) deployed
  • Monitoring, EDR, and backup agents live
  • Helpdesk channels opened (portal, phone, email)
  • Named account team introduced
iv.
Step four · Year 1 and beyond

The long game.

Partnership, not vendor

After onboarding, the real work begins. You get a named account team, a monthly check-in with your primary engineer, and a quarterly business review with our vCIO that covers security posture, roadmap, and anything coming down the pike.

Our longest-tenured clients have been with us since 2005. That's the goal — the kind of relationship where we know your team's names, your clients' names, and which of your partners is secretly still using the old Exchange server.

The ongoing rhythm
  • Named primary engineer (you meet them on day one)
  • Monthly operational check-in
  • Quarterly business review (vCIO)
  • Annual technology & budget roadmap
  • 24/7 helpdesk with real humans
(Principles)

Six operating principles we actually live by.

01

A real human picks up.

Every ticket, every call, every time. No tier-one queue, no offshore first-touch.

02

If we wouldn't use it, we won't sell it.

Our tool recommendations are what we'd deploy for our own business. Not what has the best reseller margin.

03

Fix it at the root.

A ticket closed without a root cause is a ticket that comes back. We'd rather spend the hour once.

04

Document as you go.

If the knowledge only lives in one engineer's head, your environment is a hostage situation waiting to happen.

05

Plain English, always.

Jargon is a hiding spot. We explain what we did, why, and what it means, without acronym theater.

06

Say no when we should.

We'll tell you when you don't need the thing you're asking for, even if the thing is billable.

Start with step one.

A 45-minute conversation with a senior engineer. No slides. No obligation. We'll tell you what we'd do differently.

Book a consult → 1.888.eSOZO.IT