IT, Cyber Security and AI Oversight
You do not need another vendor. You need somebody who can tell you whether the one in front of you is right. Three firms have quoted you this year. One for the network, one for cyber security, one with AI somewhere in the name. Each sounded competent. Each used language nobody in your building can evaluate. And the person who has to decide is you, on top of everything else you decide.
That is not a technology problem, and hiring another technology company will not fix it. It is a gap in your management layer. In a larger company somebody sits between the owner and the vendor, translates in both directions, and is accountable for whether the thing actually delivers. At your size nobody holds that seat, so the decision gets made on instinct or it gets postponed until something forces it. I hold that seat part time, as part of a fractional COO or CCO engagement. I am not a replacement for your IT provider. I am the reason you end up with the right one.
AI Integration
Practical AI in an industrial business does not start with the tool. It starts with information organized well enough to point one at. Quoting, drawings, part numbering, customer records. Get that right and the technology earns its keep. Skip it and you have bought an expensive way to produce the same answers more slowly.
What You Actually Have
Before anybody is called, a plain inventory. What you run, where your information lives, what is duplicated, what is exposed and what nobody has looked at in years. It takes less time than owners expect, and it usually changes the shopping list.
Cyber Security
You will be sold a stack. Some of it you need and some of it is priced for a company ten times your size. I read the proposals, tell you which controls genuinely reduce your exposure and which are there to pad the quote, and make sure what you buy gets configured rather than just invoiced.
Choosing and Managing the Firm
Writing the requirement, bringing in the right firms, and comparing quotes that are built to be hard to compare. Then holding whoever you choose to a schedule and checking what was delivered against what was promised.
Small doesn't mean safe. According to Verizon's 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report, ransomware appeared in 88% of breaches at small and medium-sized businesses — more than double the rate at large enterprises (39%) — with a median ransom payment of $115,000, a devastating sum for most SMBs. The number that should worry you is not the ransom. It is that the decisions protecting you against it are being made by somebody with a day job running the company.