Your IT staff is overwhelmed or leaving.

If you’ve got a small IT department—one to three people—and the most senior person is leaving you, we are a perfect fit. We had a client who had an IT department shrink down to just one, then that remaining person put in their two weeks notice. We were able to come in and assume control of everything for the client and keep everything running completely smooth. If you have remaining staff in the department, we can discretely talk you through whether it’s best to keep them or transition to completely outsourced. If they stay, we can transition in and even help you oversee the other staff members to work through our ticketing systems and processes.

Your current IT is an internal employee with other job duties.

We see this so often. It’s almost always the finance person, but it could be an office administrator, or someone else who gets the duties of “IT Support” dumped on them in addition to their regular duties. They Google and fix about 65% of the problems, and the other 35% you just put up with unless it’s critical. If it’s critical, you’re probable now Googling and landed on our website. We love to take that IT burden away from that employee and hear them sigh in relief as they resume their normal job duties.

You have a complex IT situation.

This is often where we get referred in. We do extremely well with clients who have a lot of complexity in their networks, including mixed servers, strange documentation, or unclear strategy. We do really well getting you back on track and fixing other provider’s messes. If your call with us starts with things like “we’re special because of…” or “around here things always break because…” don’t worry—we’ve probably seen worse or a more complex situation before.

You care about information security.

We have a true internal culture that supports security. You won’t hear about us on the news using "Password123” as an admin password. We have a robust change management process to make sure all changes to client environments are made in a secure manner. Unauthorized changes are one of the top sources of hackers infiltrating networks. We use the latest technology to prevent and detect threats that get past the protective measures, including log monitoring and event reviews.

Your organization has lots of board members, partners, or some other complex ownership.

Very few of our clients are single-owner companies. Almost all of our client have between three and five “partners” who act as the executive decision makers. This can be a public governing board, private partnership between family, investor ownership group, etc. We do well with single owners too, but we have special diplomatic skills to navigate the approvals and reporting of complex governed organizations.

You have compliance requirements.

We do well in PCI, HIPAA, CJIS, and SOX environments.

Your phone system is dying or you’re paying too much for it

We offer phone system (PBX) and carrier services on a limited basis for select situations. If you want to talk more about this, call us or get in contact.

You’re just price shopping your existing IT company.

There are a lot of approaches out there to IT. There are a lot of companies that provide IT support, and they will probably do it differently than we do. They may staff differently, use different software tools, they may focus on some more specific aspect of IT, they may also run a barbecue restaurant on the side. Who knows? All of these factors lead to different pricing and models. If your current IT provider is doing a decent job taking care of you, shopping around just to make sure you’re getting a good deal isn’t the best use of time.

You’ve been fired from previous IT provider.

It may seem odd, but we check references from your previous IT provider. We always ask the tough questions to understand why a relationship ended. We expect a relationship based on mutual respect. We know it’s always the client’s network and their final decision, but we want to see a demonstrated history that a client will receive advice, even when it’s tough to hear.

You want Emerald to only be a fire department.

We mean this in the metaphoric sense. If you need a literal fire put out, call 911.
Sometimes we get asked to come on retainer just to be an escalation point for existing IT department or another provider. While sometimes this works, we usually aren’t a great fit if your IT department is in constant chaos and you’re unwilling to make some difficult decisions to adopt best practices we recommend.

If we can’t share responsibility for the end result in your IT and how we get there, we aren;t going to be a great fit.

You won’t renew maintenance agreements or license software properly.

If you don’t follow software EULAs (End User License Agreement) licensing terms, it’s a no go. We do not budge on this and we will not help you commit fraud. We comply with all terms set for by Microsoft, Adobe, and any other software company out there.

Also, if you refuse to properly pay for software maintenance agreements for core software that is mission critical, we cannot help you if the software breaks. We will not become a safety blanket for refusal to pay software vendors. If you want clarity on this, call us and we can discuss.