Get to Know Your IT People and Not Just Their Business

Most businesses choose an IT provider on price and a good first meeting, then discover eighteen months later that nothing is documented, nobody has reviewed the backups, and the person who knew their setup has left.

These are the questions that actually separate providers — grouped by what you’re trying to find out.

Can they prove the track record?

Everyone says they’re responsive and proactive. Ask for the evidence instead:

  • Two references in your industry, at your size. An MSP whose clients are all 200-seat offices will not understand a crew working from job trailers.
  • Average response and resolution times from the last quarter — actual figures from their ticketing system, not the SLA target.
  • Their client retention rate. High churn in this industry usually means overselling.
  • How long their technicians stay. Continuity matters more than headcount.

How do they handle support day to day?

The support process is where you’ll spend the relationship, so understand it before signing:

  • How do requests come in — phone, email, portal — and does an urgent one reach a human quickly?
  • Who triages, and on what basis is something classed as urgent?
  • When does an issue escalate, and to whom?
  • Is after-hours support included, billed, or unavailable?
  • Will you deal with the same people, or whoever is free?

A provider who can answer these crisply has thought about them. One who answers “just give us a call” has not.

Is anything written down?

Documentation is the least glamorous question on this list and the one that will cost you most if the answer is wrong. If your provider’s knowledge of your systems lives in one technician’s memory, you are exposed the day that person leaves — and so are they.

Ask what gets documented and how you’d get a copy: network diagrams, device inventory, licence records, ISP and vendor account details, backup configuration and restore procedures, and an administrative credential list.

Then ask the question that matters: if we part ways, do we get all of that? The answer should be an immediate yes.

Who holds the keys?

Your domain name, your Microsoft 365 tenant, your firewall’s admin account — these should be registered to your business, with your provider holding delegated access. It is common to find them registered to the provider instead, which turns an ordinary change of supplier into a negotiation.

Check the domain registrant before anything else. It’s the single most common place businesses discover they don’t own what they assumed they owned.

Do they plan, or only react?

The difference between a supplier and an advisor shows up in whether anyone reviews your technology when nothing is wrong. A proper quarterly review isn’t a sales meeting — it should cover:

  • Ticket patterns: what keeps recurring, and what’s being done about the cause rather than the symptom
  • Hardware age and a replacement plan, so failures are scheduled rather than sudden
  • Backup and restore testing — when a restore was last actually performed, not just whether backups ran
  • Security posture, including anything your cyber insurer will ask about at renewal
  • What’s coming — headcount, new sites, software changes, seasonal peaks

If a provider has no scheduled review, your IT strategy is whatever happened to break recently.

Do they understand your industry?

Generic IT support handles email and laptops. It often doesn’t handle a site trailer with no fixed line, tablets that go in a truck, estimating software that must be available on bid day, or a shop floor where Wi-Fi has to survive steel and concrete.

Ask what they run for businesses like yours. If the answer is generic, the support will be too.

The short version

Ask for real numbers rather than promises, find out what’s documented and whether you’d get it, confirm you own your own accounts, and check that someone reviews your technology when nothing is broken. Those four cover most of the ways this relationship goes wrong.

Five answers that should give you pause

  • “We’ll get you documentation once we’re set up.” Documentation written later is documentation never written. Ask what exists for current clients.
  • A quote well below everyone else’s. Someone has excluded something. Find out what before assuming you found a bargain.
  • No named exclusions in the contract. “Fully managed” with nothing listed as outside scope means the scope is decided when you have a problem.
  • Vagueness about who owns the admin accounts. If this takes more than a sentence to answer, the answer is probably not you.
  • A long contract with no exit terms. Three years is fine if you can leave at twelve months for cause. Three years with no exit is a hostage arrangement.

What a competent transition looks like

How a provider runs onboarding is the clearest preview of how they’ll run everything else. A serious one will, in the first 30–60 days:

  1. Audit before changing anything — inventory every device, licence, vendor account and circuit, and tell you what they found, including the awkward parts.
  2. Take ownership of the accounts properly, with your business as registrant and them as delegated administrators.
  3. Test a restore. Not check that backups ran — actually restore something and show you it worked.
  4. Fix the urgent security gaps first — MFA, unpatched firmware, standing remote access — rather than starting with a hardware proposal.
  5. Give you a written plan with what’s wrong now, what’s being fixed, and what should be budgeted over 12–24 months.

A provider who leads with a hardware quote before completing step one is selling equipment, not managing your technology.

Happy to be asked all of the above ourselves — get in touch, or read about how we work and what’s covered in our managed IT services.

Related reading