When you hire an IT provider, you are handing a stranger the keys to your business: your email, your files, your customer records, your ability to work at all. Most owners check the price and the list of services carefully. Far fewer ask the simplest question: who actually runs this company, and who will be working on my systems?
The brand on the proposal, the website and the sales presentation can tell you surprisingly little. This article is about looking behind it.
Why the people matter more than the logo
A managed IT provider (or MSP, for managed service provider) makes hundreds of small decisions on your behalf: how your network is laid out, which updates go in and when, what gets backed up, what happens at 2 a.m. when a server stops. Those decisions reflect the judgment and priorities of the people at the top.
If the company is run by technical people, decisions tend to start from how the technology works. If it is run mainly by sales and business people, decisions tend to start from what was sold and what the contract requires. Both kinds of company can serve clients well. But you should know which one you are dealing with.
How franchise and reseller models work
Some IT providers are independent. Others operate under a franchise or as resellers of a larger company’s services. These models are common and legal, and some are run very well. It helps to understand how they work.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s consumer guide to buying a franchise describes the general arrangement: the owner pays for the right to use the franchisor’s name and its system of doing business, typically pays ongoing royalties, receives training and an operating manual, and may be required to buy from approved suppliers. Applied to IT, that usually means a brand, a sales playbook and a standard tool stack supplied by head office.
That can be a real strength: proven processes, buying power, a recognizable name. It also means the local owner may have bought into IT as a business opportunity rather than coming up through engineering. In that case the depth of technical skill depends heavily on who they have hired, and on whether the standard package actually fits your business.
Resellers work in a similar way. They package and sell services that another company designs and operates. Again, nothing wrong with that, as long as you know who is really doing the work and who you will reach when something goes wrong.
Questions to ask before you sign
About ownership
- Who owns the company, and where are they based?
- What is the owner’s background: engineering and operations, or sales and business?
- Is this an independent company, a franchise, or a reseller of someone else’s service? If it is a franchise or reseller, what is decided locally and what is decided by head office?
About the technical team
- Who will design your network and approve changes to it? Can you meet them?
- How many senior engineers does the company have, and are they employees or subcontractors?
- Who writes the documentation for your systems, and will you have a copy?
About support
- When you call or email, who answers: a local technician, a call center or an outsourced help desk?
- How does a hard problem reach a senior engineer, and how long does that usually take?
- What happens after hours and on weekends?
About the tools
- Which tools are standard because head office requires them, and which were chosen for your business?
- Who configures those tools, who watches their alerts, and who acts on them?
About responsibility
- Exactly what is included, and what is not?
- Who is responsible for security monitoring, incident response and backup testing?
That last point is not just our opinion. CISA, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, together with partner agencies, advises MSP customers to make sure their contract spells out whether the provider or the customer owns specific responsibilities such as hardening, detection and incident response, and how the provider will notify them of an incident.
How will you know the work is being done?
Asking the right questions before you sign is half the job. The other half comes later: checking that what you were sold is actually in place. A gap between the proposal and the reality is very common. A service appears on the invoice, but it was never fully set up, or it was set up once and quietly left behind.
You don’t need to be technical to check. Ask for evidence you can read:
- Go through the original proposal line by line and ask, for each item, where it is running and what it covers. Was everything you were sold actually implemented?
- Ask for regular reports that show work done, not just tickets closed: updates installed, backups completed, restores tested, alerts handled.
- Ask to see the documentation for your systems, and when it was last updated.
- Ask what was improved in the last quarter, not only what was fixed.
A provider that is doing the work can show it without much effort. If the answers are vague, or the evidence never arrives, take that seriously.
Reading the answers
Good providers, of any kind, answer these questions easily. They will tell you who the engineers are, introduce you to them and explain their design choices in plain English. Be careful if the answers are mostly about the brand, the tool names or the price, or if every technical question gets passed to “the team” without anyone you can actually talk to.
Also watch who shows up to the meetings. If you only ever meet salespeople before signing, ask to meet the person who will be responsible for your systems afterward. Our guide on how to choose a managed IT provider covers the rest of the evaluation.
How FTI does it
Finite Technologies is independent and Alaskan-owned by the same family since it was founded in 1990 as an engineering software company. Our founder, Scott Henderson, is an engineer and mathematician, and FTI is run as an engineering team. You can read more about us and our history.
Our managed IT runs on Kaseya’s integrated platform, with tickets, documentation, monitoring and backup connected, and is secured with Sophos. Our help desk answers 24/7, with senior engineers behind it, and an AI layer works alongside those engineers while people make the decisions. We are happy to answer every question on this list.
