IT support sized for small business.
For the 5–50 person company where nobody's job title says IT. Helpdesk, security, Microsoft 365 and backup on one flat monthly fee — answered by an engineer in Ottawa, month-to-month, documented so you are never trapped.
In most small companies, IT is whoever was closest to the router when it blinked.
It works — until the week it doesn't. The office manager resets passwords, a cousin built the Wi-Fi, and the backup was configured once in 2021 and never checked. None of that is negligence; it is what rational people do when a real IT department costs more than the problem seems to. The gap in that logic is that the problem changed: one in four Canadian organizations were hit by ransomware in the past year, per the CIRA 2025 Cybersecurity Survey — and small firms are on that list precisely because attackers assume nobody is watching. Small business IT support exists to put a professional floor under the company without hiring anyone: a flat fee that covers the helpdesk calls you can see and the maintenance you can't.
What a small company actually needs.
Not a scaled-down enterprise contract — a different list. Six items cover the real exposure of a typical 5–50 person office; everything else is optional and we will say so.
| The layer | What it looks like | Without it |
|---|---|---|
| 01Helpdesk | What it looks likeStaff call or email an engineer directly; remote session in minutes, on-site same-day when hands are needed | Without itProblems queue behind whoever is least busy |
| 02Security baseline | What it looks likeEDR on every machine, MFA enforced, email filtering — the Sophos stack, sized down honestly | Without itYou are the practice target |
| 03Microsoft 365 | What it looks likeLicences right-sized, mail flow clean, sharing policies sane, joiners and leavers handled the day they happen | Without itEx-staff keep access; licences pile up unused |
| 04Backup that restores | What it looks likeBackup covering the files, the mailboxes and the systems — with test restores on a schedule, reported to you | Without itYou find out it was broken on the day you need it |
| 05Patching & updates | What it looks likeEvery machine monitored and patched on a documented cadence — including the Windows 10 stragglers nobody wants to think about | Without itKnown holes stay open for months |
| 06The look-ahead | What it looks likeA short quarterly note: what is ageing, what renews, what to budget — so hardware dies on a schedule, not a Monday | Without itEvery failure is a surprise expense |
The honest version of the sales pitch is arithmetic: this list, bought as break-fix invoices and one bad ransomware week, costs multiples of the flat fee. The reasoning is laid out in why small businesses need real IT support, and the plan itself is described in full under Managed IT. If you just need a broken machine fixed today, that is the repair bench — no contract involved.
The ones small businesses actually ask.
If yours isn’t here, ask it directly — you’ll get an answer from an engineer, not a form letter.
One flat monthly fee, priced per user or per device against your actual environment — quoted in writing after a short walkthrough, not from a rate card. Small companies get the same structure as our larger clients, scaled down; there is no separate, thinner product for being small.
No — five seats is a normal starting point. At that size you skip the helpdesk-volume pricing tiers built for bigger firms, and the plan leans harder on prevention: security baseline, patching, backup and Microsoft 365 done right, with support on top.
If it works, keep it — genuinely. The pattern that breaks is single-person dependency: they are away the week the server dies, and nothing was documented. Some clients keep their trusted person for day-to-day and use us for the layers underneath — monitoring, patching, backup verification and security — with everything written down.
You can start smaller, and most do. The floor we will not go below is the security baseline plus verified backup — selling support without those is taking money to watch a fire risk. Helpdesk hours, after-hours cover and projects layer on when the need is real.
You reach an engineer directly by phone or email — no tiered queue. Remote sessions start in minutes during business hours, down-systems are worked by impact with a 15-minute response target on managed plans, and on-site across Ottawa and the NCR is same-day when hands are needed.
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Small business IT support across the National Capital Region — Ottawa, Kanata, Nepean, Barrhaven, Orléans, Stittsville, Manotick and Gatineau. Remote support covers anywhere in Canada, and the office is on Thurston Drive in the east end.
Run the company. We'll run the computers.
Twenty minutes, no deck. We walk your setup, quote a flat fee in writing, and tell you which parts you don't need yet.