Most "our MSP is rubbish" stories are really onboarding stories. A good provider can inherit a messy environment and turn it into a calm one within a month; a bad one logs in, fixes the immediate fire, and learns about everything else the hard way six months later when something breaks. If you are thinking about switching, the most useful question to ask any MSP is not what their helpdesk SLA is — it is what their first 30 days look like.
Week 1 — discovery, not action
The first week is almost entirely listening and documenting. We sit down with the leadership team to understand the business, the seasons, the dependencies and the risks. We walk the office, photograph the comms room, label cables, and run automated discovery across the network. We audit the Microsoft 365 (or Google Workspace) tenant, the domain registrar, the line-of-business apps, the backup estate and the licence position. The deliverable at the end of week one is a written "as-found" document — what we inherited, what is good, what is risky, what is missing.
Week 2 — secure the front door
Before anything else, we lock the obvious risks: enforce MFA on every account, rotate shared and admin passwords into a managed password vault, review and trim global-admin and domain-admin membership, deploy our endpoint protection and RMM to every device, and validate that backups actually run and actually restore. None of this is glamorous. All of it is the difference between a quiet first quarter and a 2am phone call.
Week 3 — knowledge transfer and ticketing
By week three the helpdesk takes over day-to-day support. Every user has been introduced to the new portal, the new ticketing email and the new phone number. We hold short floor-walks so people can put a face to the support team. Internally we run knowledge-transfer sessions on the quirky bits of the environment — that one line-of-business app that needs a registry tweak, the printer in finance that only works on Tuesdays — and document them in our knowledge base.
Week 4 — strategic roadmap
The final week is where the relationship shifts from reactive to proactive. We present a 12-month roadmap: the risks we want to close, the lifecycle replacements coming up, the licensing optimisations available, the projects the leadership team has asked us to scope. We agree a monthly or quarterly service review cadence and the metrics we will report against.
Questions to ask any MSP before you sign
- "Walk me through your first 30 days. What is delivered, by whom, and by when?"
- "Who specifically will I deal with day-to-day, and who is the escalation point?"
- "How do you handle out-of-hours? Is it the same team or an overflow?"
- "What does your offboarding look like if we leave in 18 months? Do we get our documentation?"
- "What is included in the monthly fee and what is billed extra? Show me a real invoice."
- "How many clients of our size do you currently support, and can we talk to two of them?"
Switching IT provider should feel like a relief, not a leap of faith. If you would like to see what our onboarding plan would look like for your business specifically, get in touch and we will put one together as part of the proposal — no obligation, and you keep the document either way.
