Professional services
Your clients trust you with their material. Increasingly, they check.
Managed IT for Houston advisory, legal, accounting and finance firms. Built around the two things that actually cost you money here: an unanswerable client questionnaire, and an hour of billable time you cannot invoice.
What is different here
Three pressures other sectors do not have
Your clients audit you now
Security questionnaires used to arrive from enterprises only. They now arrive from mid sized clients too, and they ask for evidence rather than assurances. Losing a bid over an unanswerable questionnaire is a commercial problem, not an IT one.
Downtime is billed time
In a firm that sells hours, an outage is not lost productivity, it is lost revenue that cannot be recovered later. That makes prevention easier to justify than in most businesses, because the number is already on a timesheet.
Confidentiality is the product
Clients hand you material they would not give anyone else. A breach damages the engagement you lost the data from and every other relationship at the same time, which is a different order of consequence from most sectors.
The questionnaire problem
The bid you lose without being told why
A client sends a security questionnaire as part of onboarding or a renewal. It asks whether staff receive security training, how often backups are tested, what your patch window is, who has administrative access and when that was last reviewed. None of the questions are difficult. The problem is that they ask for evidence of something that happened over the past year, and evidence cannot be produced retrospectively.
Firms usually meet this for the first time under a deadline, and the honest answers turn out to be unavailable rather than unfavourable. Sometimes the work is lost quietly and nobody explains why. That is the expensive version, because you cannot fix a problem you were never told about.
The reason security awareness training, phishing simulation and tested recovery sit inside the plan rather than being sold as a project is precisely this. They generate the records. A year later, when the questionnaire arrives, the answers already exist.
Questions from firms
Straight answers
What do professional services firms need that a generic IT provider misses?
Two things, usually. The first is being able to answer a client security questionnaire with evidence rather than intent, because in this sector your clients audit you and a weak answer costs work. The second is understanding that an hour of downtime is billable time that never comes back, not just inconvenience, which changes what is worth spending to prevent. A provider who treats your firm like a generic office will get both of those wrong.
Our files are client confidential. What actually protects them?
Access control and monitoring do most of the work, and neither is exciting. Who can reach what, reviewed rather than assumed. Multi factor authentication, so a stolen password is not sufficient on its own. Endpoint protection watching behaviour rather than files, reporting into a 24/7 SOC. Backups that have been restored in a test rather than merely taken. The unglamorous controls are the ones that hold, and they are the ones an audit asks you to evidence.
A client sent us a security questionnaire. Can you help us answer it?
Yes, and it is one of the more common reasons firms call. The questionnaire is asking for records: training completed, patches applied inside a window, access reviewed, a restore tested, an incident response plan that exists. Those records only exist if something was collecting them before the questionnaire arrived. Where there are genuine gaps we will tell you which ones matter to the answer and which ones do not, rather than quoting for all of them.
Do you work with financial firms and funds?
Yes. The Enterprise plan at $253 per user per month was built with funds in mind: managed virtual desktops for every user, a higher tier security stack and a priority escalation path. That shape suits firms where data exposure and downtime are existential rather than inconvenient, which describes most of the fund and advisory work we see.
What does it cost for a firm our size?
A 20 person firm on Fully Managed IT is $3,060 a month at $153 per user. Compared against billable rates that is usually a fraction of a single lost day across the firm, which is the comparison worth making rather than measuring it against your current IT spend.
We are twenty five people with no IT staff at all. Is that unusual?
No, it is the most common shape we work with. Firms of 11 to 50 people rarely justify a full time IT hire, so the role gets absorbed by whoever is most comfortable with technology, usually on top of fee earning work. That arrangement holds until an audit, a departure or an incident, and it is normally one of those three that prompts the call.
Book a 30 minute IT review
Bring the questionnaire you cannot answer, or the outage that cost you a day. We will tell you the two things we would fix first, and you keep the notes whether or not you hire us.