Trusting Your IT to a Team That Knows Your Environment
How A Small Edmonton Accounting Firm Traded Reactive IT for a Partner Built Around Their Needs
IT is no longer something that keeps this office manager of an Edmonton accounting firm up at night. For someone managing IT alongside everything else in a ten-person office, that's an enormous responsibility off her shoulders. Getting there took a bad stretch, a well-timed leap, and eventually a partnership with PC Corp that was willing to meet her exactly where she was.
The firm has been part of Edmonton's business community since the 1950s. Today, it runs a fully paperless environment, holds sensitive financial data for a wide client base, and regularly exchanges documents digitally with many clients granting the firm direct access to their cloud-based software. There are no paper backups to fall back on. If the network goes down or gets compromised, the business stops.
The office manager, who has been with the firm for ten years, oversees everything, IT included, alongside her primary role. For a long time, that included a managed IT relationship she genuinely valued. Then it didn't.
WHEN THE PROVIDER THEY TRUSTED WAS GONE
For most of the office manager’s time at the firm, IT was one of the easier things on her plate. The provider they worked with knew their environment, checked in proactively, and genuinely felt like part of the team. That changed when the company was acquired by a national firm.
"The service levels tanked," she recalls. "The people working with us had no familiarity with our environment, nor did they take five minutes to try to familiarize themselves before getting in touch with us. I didn't know who to call if I had a problem."
The breaking point was a workstation rollout. The firm had purchased new computers for the whole team and hired the provider to handle setup and installation. What followed was, in her words, atrocious. Wrong software was installed. Old versions were used where newer ones existed. Ethernet cables were left unconnected. Old power supplies stayed in place.
"I probably could have had my 10-year-old kid come in and do just as good of a job," she says.
By the end, she had spent most of her own days walking the technician through the work while the firm was paying him to do it. That was the straw that broke the camel's back.
Why Switching Felt Risky
Knowing she had to make a change and actually making it were two different things. The office manager is the sole IT point of contact at the firm. Every question, every vendor relationship, every problem runs through her. There's no one to hand off to, no backup to step in while a transition happens.
And the timing couldn't have been worse. She was about to take the entire month of January off and leave the country. The thought of signing with a new managed IT services provider, handing over access to a network full of sensitive client data, and then disappearing for a month with limited ability to help remotely was genuinely stressful. The office manager held on longer than she should have because staying, as bad as it had gotten, felt safer than switching at the wrong moment.
When the workstation project finally tipped her over the edge, she knew she had to move regardless of the timing.
Managed i.t. Onboarding Built Around
Their Reality
What the office manager was walking into wasn't a clean handoff. She had a tight window before the firm closed for Christmas, a month-long absence starting in January, and tax season looming on the other side. A standard onboarding process wasn't going to work.
She appreciated that we didn't try to force one. "PC Corp did such a great job of working with the chaos that was going on in my world at the time," she says. "They kind of fragmented the onboarding for me, which I really appreciated. They could deal with the pressing issues first and then finish it off once I got back."
Before full onboarding to our managed IT services even began, we worked with the firm’s office manager to bring the environment to a safe baseline through two remediation projects:
1) Replacing outdated network switches that had been limiting our ability to monitor the network remotely (something nobody had flagged before.)
2) Separating the guest Wi-Fi from the staff network, creating three distinct access points so that clients coming into the office couldn't inadvertently reach the server."Nobody had suggested or identified that as a kind of a vulnerability in our net work before," she notes.
The office manager left for her month away more confident than she'd expected.
"I didn't feel like once I signed on the dotted line that they kind of went, 'all right, we're good.' They were right alongside and worked really hard to ease my concerns."
What the Relationship Looks Like Now
Six months in, the accounting firm’s office manager is still working through a few remaining onboarding items. Staff cybersecurity training is coming, and the bigger server conversation is just getting started. Tax season ran through April 30, and as a busy accounting firm, there were stretches where she simply couldn't carve out the time. We worked around it, keeping things moving in the background and checking in when she was ready, not when it was convenient for us.
Day-to-day, the difference is hard to miss:
- Tickets get a response right away. If the first technician gets stumped, others are brought in immediately.
- Monthly check-ins are on the calendar, and she feels confident that if anything noteworthy happened in the background, she'd hear about it.
- Patching, updates, and background maintenance happen without her having to think about it. "I don't really want to be involved in all that, to be honest," she says.
The impact on the people around her is quieter, but real.
The firm's owner doesn't deal with IT day-to-day. That's always been the office manager's domain. But she's noticed a shift.
"I do know that she definitely feels a lot more confidence in our situation," she says, "which is really important to her. She owns the business. If everything falls apart, it's falling apart for her the most."
As for the rest of the team, they're mostly arm's length from IT.
The way the office manager puts it: "The only thing they would know is they don't hear me yelling and complaining as much about our IT."
Continued Impact
Looking ahead, a significant server upgrade is on the horizon. She isn't the type to just sign off on a recommendation.
"I want to understand why we should go with Path A instead of Path B," she says. "I'm not a programmer, but I want to understand why we're doing what we're doing."
She's expecting us to work through that decision with her, not hand it down. Based on everything so far, she has every reason to believe we will.
The partnership is still relatively new, and the larger strategic work is just getting started. She is looking forward to sharing more details about her managed IT services experience as the relationship grows.
If you're managing IT at a small firm in Alberta without a dedicated IT person and this situation sounds familiar, connect with us. We'd be glad to have a conversation.
