How it works
From first call to fully managed in about a week
No six-week discovery phase, no consultant day rates before anything improves. Here's the whole process, including what we need from you.
How long does onboarding take?
About one week for a typical cloud-first small business. Day 1 is automated discovery of your Microsoft 365 tenant, devices, licences and security posture. Days 2–4 cover security hardening, agent deployment, backup configuration and licence reclamation. Day 5 is documentation. Go-live follows, with close monitoring for two weeks while we tune the automation to how you actually work. Heavily on-premise environments take two to three weeks.
Before you commit
The free audit comes first
Every engagement starts with an audit, and you get the report whether or not you hire us. It's not a sales document with a total at the bottom — it's the actual findings.
What we look at
- Microsoft 365 tenant configuration and security baseline
- Licence assignment, waste and duplication
- Device inventory, age, patch status and encryption
- MFA and conditional access coverage
- Backup coverage and whether restores have ever been tested
- Exposed services and obvious attack surface
What you get
- Written findings with severity ratings
- Monthly licence waste figure in dollars
- Prioritised remediation list
- A tier recommendation with the reasoning
- An honest "stay where you are" if that's the answer
- No obligation, no follow-up sequence
What we need from you
Read-only delegated access to your Microsoft 365 tenant for the audit period, and about 30 minutes of someone's time to answer questions about your business. That's it. Access is revocable by you at any point, and we remove it automatically if you don't proceed.
Onboarding, step by step
What the fee actually buys
We publish this because "onboarding fee" is usually a black box. Roughly half of this work is automated; the half that isn't is why the fee exists.
Discovery & audit mostly automated
Full tenant, device, licence and security posture scan through Microsoft Graph. We pull the entire picture programmatically rather than sending you a 40-question spreadsheet. Output is your written findings report.
Security hardening human judgement
MFA enforcement, conditional access policies, legacy authentication disabled, admin account separation, mail flow and anti-phishing configuration tuned properly. The automation proposes a baseline; an engineer decides what fits your business and what would break it.
Agent deployment mostly automated
Management and monitoring agents pushed to every device, policy applied, patch rings configured. Remote devices included — nobody has to bring a laptop in.
Backup configuration human judgement
Microsoft 365 and endpoint backup configured, first full backup verified, and a test restore actually performed. We check it works rather than trusting a green tick.
Line-of-business discovery human only
Finding and documenting the software your business genuinely depends on — including the thing on a PC under someone's desk. This has no API and no shortcut. It's the single largest part of the manual work.
Documentation mostly automated
Assets, accounts, vendors, network, licences and recovery procedures generated from discovery data, then reviewed by a person. Exportable and yours permanently, including if you leave.
Licence reclamation mostly automated
Unused and orphaned licences identified and reclaimed. For most companies this recovers real money every month, and the saving is entirely yours.
Go-live & kickoff human only
A short session with your team on how to get help, what to expect, and what the automation will and won't do. Then two weeks of close monitoring while we tune it to your actual patterns.
Onboarding fees
AI Support: $1,495. Managed: $2,495. Managed Plus: from $3,995, quoted after the audit because these environments vary far more. Upgrading tiers later never triggers a second onboarding fee.
Switching
Coming from another provider
Roughly two to four weeks, run in parallel so nothing drops. We take over administrative access, document whatever your current provider has, deploy our tooling alongside theirs, verify everything works, then cut over.
One thing worth doing early: send us your current contract before you give notice. We'll read it with you. Three-year auto-renewals, offboarding fees and clauses where the provider owns your Microsoft tenant are all common, and all easier to handle before you've triggered a notice period.
If your current provider owns your tenant
Some MSPs hold customer Microsoft tenants under their own partner account, which makes leaving painful. It's recoverable, but it takes longer and needs to be planned. Ask them directly who the tenant is registered to — the answer tells you a lot about the relationship.
Questions
Onboarding FAQ
Can onboarding be fully automated?
No, and anyone claiming otherwise hasn't done many. About half is genuinely automatable — anything reachable through an API. The other half is physical and legacy: mapping the network, finding the line-of-business apps, migrating data, and sitting down with your staff. That's roughly twelve hours of human work, and it's what the fee covers.
Will there be downtime?
Almost never. Agent deployment and policy changes are non-disruptive. Where a change does require a restart or a brief interruption — some security policy changes, for instance — we schedule it with you outside working hours.
What if the audit finds serious problems?
We tell you plainly, rank them by severity, and quote remediation separately if it goes beyond standard hardening. Occasionally we find something bad enough that our advice is to fix it immediately regardless of whether you hire us. We'd rather say that than quietly include it in a proposal.
Do you need to visit our office?
Usually not. Onboarding is remote by default. If you have on-premise servers, complex networking, or want someone physically present for the kickoff, we arrange an on-site visit — included in Managed Plus onboarding, quoted separately on the lower tiers.
Start with the free audit
Twenty minutes on a call, then a written report on your Microsoft tenant, devices and licences. Yours to keep whether or not you hire us.