Discovery Process

What's in IT for you?

A no-pressure deep-dive into your IT spend, your contracts, and your actual day-to-day. By the end, you will know exactly what you are paying for, what you actually need, and where your real risks are.

We almost never find a dealership that's underspending on IT.

What we find is sprawl. Tools layered on tools, licenses no one is tracking, contracts that auto-renewed three years ago. The good news: this is fixable, and the savings usually pay for our engagement.

1

Stakeholder interviews

30-minute conversations with the principal, GM, controller, service manager, parts manager, and a few line technicians. Different people see different problems.

2

Contract & license audit

You forward us your invoices and we map them. Every Microsoft 365 SKU, every monitoring agent, every backup license, every circuit. We tell you what's redundant.

3

Technical walk-down

Onsite or remote. Server room, IT closet, every switch and AP, every shop laptop, every print server. We document what is actually deployed.

4

Risk & gap report

You get a written report: what works, what doesn't, where the real risks are (not just the scary-sounding ones), and a prioritized roadmap.

What you walk away with

A discovery you can act on, even if you don't hire us

Honest cost-to-value mapping

For every recurring IT expense, we score it against three questions: is it being used, is it needed, and is the price right? You get a single spreadsheet that ranks your entire IT spend by ROI.

  • Which Microsoft 365 licenses are over-provisioned (E5 for everyone is rarely the right answer)
  • Which monitoring or backup tools overlap and can be consolidated
  • Where you are paying premium prices for commodity services
  • Which vendor contracts have auto-renewed silently and need to be renegotiated

The risks no one has told you about

We are not in the fear-selling business. But your insurer, your auditor, and the FTC all care about specific things. We tell you which of them apply to your dealership and which are noise.

  • FTC Safeguards Rule readiness (dealers are a regulated financial institution)
  • Backup recoverability (when did you last test a restore?)
  • Identity and MFA gaps in DMS, M365, VPN, and remote tools
  • Single points of failure in the network and DMS path

A right-sized proposal — or a clean handoff

If we are a fit, we propose a managed services agreement built around what you actually need. If we are not a fit, we tell you that and hand you the report so your existing IT team or MSP can run with it. Either way, you get value.

  • Flat per-user or per-site pricing — no surprise hourly meters
  • Roadmap with phased projects, prioritized by impact
  • Clear scope: what we own, what you own, what your vendors own
  • Quarterly business review cadence to revisit and adjust

Discovery is free. Clarity is the whole point.

If at the end you decide to keep your current setup, you still walk away with a written assessment we would charge other people for. There is no downside to the conversation.

Schedule discovery