Anything that plugs in
An IT practice that began with one weekend network build and grew, on referrals alone, into twenty retained clients across two decades. The job description never really changed: anything that plugs in and can fail in interesting ways.
The stuck thing
Small offices run on systems nobody on staff is paid to understand: the network, the backups, the server in the closet, the software that arrived half-designed from a vendor. When those systems stall, the business stalls. Most of these offices can’t justify an IT department; what they need is one person who understands their actual work and keeps the machinery serving it.
The diagnosis
That’s a seam problem, not a computer problem. The answer wasn’t selling hardware or hours; it was long-term system design and proactive maintenance: understand each client’s business first, then shape the systems around it, and catch failures before they land. Trust compounds. So do well-kept systems.
Made it go
It started at Merrill Lynch in 1994, where I was working as a data analyst and desktop-publishing expert for a brokerage team. The team was growing; I advised them on the network expansion they needed, built it over a single weekend, and took over the care of their machines. Word traveled: first other brokers, then other Merrill Lynch offices, until I was working across six in San Diego County; then the brokers’ attorneys, appraisers, and interior designers. By the end I was serving about twenty clients at a time, many retained for more than fifteen years, every one by referral, while carrying the practice full-time through university and alongside five years consulting for Sherpa Technology Guides, maintaining and expanding IT for agencies like KPBS and Vitro Robertson.
The work was whatever the day demanded. Moving the Carlsbad Merrill Lynch office into a new building: every machine disconnected, indexed, labeled, and packed, then rebuilt on the other end, with the new building’s wiring and networking done right. Transitioning a sixteen-classroom private school from an on-site grading server, with all its backup, upgrade, and security overhead, to one of the first web-based grading platforms, so teachers could work from anywhere they could log in. And underneath it all, the quiet discipline: rotating offsite backups, generation on generation, so that in twenty years no client of mine ever lost data. When a departing broker walked off with a team’s computers overnight, the team left behind was restored onto new machines from backup and resumed normal business within a couple of days.
The practice wound down deliberately: by 2008 I was moving upstream to design at Kyocera, building better systems instead of rescuing worse ones, and the last long-held clients retired around 2013.
systems & network administration · proactive maintenance · backup & recovery · hardware repair
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