Vendor Independence

You don't need to own your whole tech stack.
You need to own the keys to move.

Your domain. Your DNS. Your cloud account root credentials. Your Google Workspace owner role. Your backups. Your data exports. Most business owners don't realize they're missing those keys — until the day they try to leave a vendor and can't.

We find what you're missing, help you take it back, and document it so you can walk away from any vendor on your timeline.

What's at Stake

What happens if your IT provider disappears tomorrow?

MSPs are bought, sold, shut down, or pivot every day. So do payment processors, marketing agencies, and SaaS vendors. The question isn't whether one of yours will eventually go away. It's whether you'll keep operating when it does.

If they hold your domain registration

Website goes dark. Email stops. Marketing assets unreachable.

If they hold your DNS records

Email auth breaks. Apps that depend on hostnames fail.

If they hold your SSL certs

Browser warnings on your site. SaaS integrations break.

If they hold your cloud account root

Data trapped. Billing in their name. No transfer path.

If they hold your Google Workspace owner role

Email, calendar, docs — admin keys gone with them.

If they hold your backups (in their storage)

Backups die when they do.

If they hold your password manager (their account)

Every credential lost.

If they hold your Apple Business / MDM

Devices orphaned. Apps can't update. New hires can't enroll.

How The Audit Works

Three steps. The plan is yours either way.

1

We share a checklist of gotchas

Domain. DNS. Cloud root. Workspace owner. Backup access. Password vault. Each one a key. The list is short, specific, and easy to understand even if you've never thought about it.

2

You answer what you can. For the rest, we find who would know.

Most owners can't answer the whole list off the top of their head. That's normal. We help you identify who in your world would know — your IT person, your bookkeeper, your developer, your MSP — and we facilitate the conversation. With your permission, we ask them directly so you don't have to.

3

You get the answers and a plan of action

A written summary: what you own, what you don't, what to take back, and the order to do it in. The plan is yours. You can implement it yourself, hand it to your existing IT, or hire us to execute. We don't lock the document behind ongoing work.

The plan is yours. Take it home, hand it to your existing IT, or hire us to implement. There's no ongoing engagement gating the document. You walk in not knowing what you don't own; you walk out with a list and a plan, regardless of what happens next.

Sample Questions

A few of the questions we'll ask.

If you can answer most of these without checking, you're ahead of most businesses. If you can't answer them, that's normal — and exactly what the audit fixes.

  • Who's the registrant on your domain — your business or your IT provider?
  • Can you log in to the DNS console without going through someone else?
  • Who's the super-admin on your Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 tenant?
  • Where do your backups live, and can you restore them without your current IT?
  • Who controls the root credentials on your AWS / Azure / Google Cloud account?
  • Who owns your business profile on Apple Maps, Google Business, Meta?
  • If your IT provider disappeared tomorrow, what wouldn't you be able to recover?

Where Domain Knowledge Lives

Past a certain size, every business should have internal IT.

The person who knows that the POS terminals reboot every Tuesday at 3am. The one who remembers why you picked that specific email setup. The one your warehouse manager actually trusts. That person doesn't work for an MSP. They work for you.

Domain knowledge of your business lives with internal staff. External providers (us included) rebuild that understanding every time we touch something. An internal IT person — even one — keeps the institutional memory in the building.

We're not here to replace your internal IT. We're here to make them capable on Apple, hand them the keys, and back them up when they need it. If you don't have internal IT yet, we can also help you scope the role and hire for it.

See also: Mac Management Training for Windows Teams — our service for internal IT teams that know Windows but need to manage Apple.

Where We Stand

MSPs aren't the problem. The lock-in pattern is.

Most MSPs are good people working inside a business model that rewards confusion. The vendor markups, the multi-year contracts, the RMM agents that are hard to remove — those are structural, not personal. We don't paint individual operators as villains.

What we do is refuse to build our own offering on top of those same patterns:

No RMM agents

We manage Apple devices through MDM, which already lives on the device. No extra agent, no extra attack surface, no extra thing to remove if you leave us.

No vendor markup

Vendor costs pass through at cost. You see the invoice. We never bake margin into someone else's product line.

No long contracts

Month-to-month after a 3-month onboarding. The onboarding minimum exists because doing this right takes time. After that, you stay because it works — not because you're locked in.

No knowledge hoarding

Every system we touch gets documented. Your team gets the docs. If we get hit by a bus, your business keeps running.

You can keep your existing MSP, your existing IT person, your existing vendors. You don't need to use us to fix this. We just want every small business owner to know what they should own — and to be able to walk away from any vendor on their timeline, ours included.

This isn't for everyone — and that's fine.

If what you want is one number per month and to never think about your IT again, that's a legitimate model. It just isn't ours. We work with people who want to understand what they own. The principles above — published rates, no markup, no lock-in, no knowledge hoarding — mean we'll cost you a small amount of attention up front. Some prospects would rather not. We'd rather lose those than dilute what we do for the ones we're built to serve.

Ready to find out what you don't own?

Book a free consultation. We'll walk through the checklist together. You'll leave with a clearer picture of what's in your name and what isn't — even if you never hire us.