Case Study: Transforming a Vancouver SME with Strategic IT Consulting
Case study · Vancouver professional-services SME
A 22-person Vancouver professional-services firm came to us with the standard small-business pattern: a slow website, a security setup held together by a heroic admin, a hosting bill that quietly grew, and a leadership team spending Friday afternoons on IT instead of clients. This case study walks through what we found, what we changed, and the measurable results inside one quarter.
Situation
The firm had grown from 8 to 22 staff in three years. The website was on a US shared host with a renewal jump, the email was on the same shared host (a small-business antipattern), MFA was inconsistent, file sharing was a mix of OneDrive and a NAS, and there was no documented incident-response process. Two scary moments in the prior year — a phishing email that nearly redirected an invoice, and a Friday outage — pushed the leadership team to ask for help.
Approach — five quiet moves over 90 days
Discovery. 1-page diagram of identity, email, files, money, and customers. Listed every account and tool in one place.
Identity + email cleanup. MFA enforced everywhere. Conditional access for risky sign-ins. Old shared mailboxes archived.
Hosting migration. Marketing site moved to Standard plan, $15 CAD/month. Cloudflare WAF and daily backups built in.
Security baseline. Team password manager, automatic patching, 30-minute team training, 1-page incident-response runbook.
Monthly review cadence. 30 minutes, last Friday of every month. Cost, security, performance.
-80%Time-to-First-Byte (1.4 s → 280 ms)
-28%Total IT spend over 12 months
0Security incidents in the following year
7 hrsPer-week leadership time recovered
Good IT consulting is fewer slides, fewer surprises, and a roadmap you can actually read.
Hosting plans
Website hosting plans
Current Metro Vancouver IT hosting plans with secure checkout. Pricing and purchase buttons are shared with the main pricing page.
Starter
Small sites and personal projects
$5CAD / month · or $60 / year
Storage: 5 GB NVMe
Bandwidth: 50 GB/mo
CDN Cloudflare & WAF protected
Free SSL + HTTP/2
Daily off-site backups (30-day retention)
Uptime monitoring & email alerts
SiteWorx access
One-click app installer (Softaculous)
Most popular
Standard
Growing businesses and marketing sites
$15CAD / month · or $180 / year
Storage: 15 GB NVMe
Bandwidth: 200 GB/mo
CDN Cloudflare & WAF protected
Free SSL + HTTP/2
Daily off-site backups (30-day retention)
Uptime monitoring & email alerts
SiteWorx access
One-click app installer (Softaculous)
Email deliverability setup (SPF, DKIM)
Pro
Heavier sites and regulated workloads
$35CAD / month · or $420 / year
Storage: 40 GB NVMe
Bandwidth: 500 GB/mo
CDN Cloudflare & WAF protected
Free SSL + HTTP/2
Daily off-site backups (30-day retention)
Uptime monitoring & email alerts
SiteWorx access
One-click app installer (Softaculous)
Email deliverability setup (SPF, DKIM)
Advanced WAF rules management
Priority support & incident response
Results, 12 months later
Twelve months after the initial engagement, the firm runs a calmer, faster, more secure operation on a smaller toolset. The leadership team spends Friday afternoons on clients, not the website. The 1-page roadmap is reviewed quarterly and updated when reality changes.
Metric
Before
After 12 months
Site uptime
~98.7%
~99.96%
Time-to-First-Byte
~1.4 s
~280 ms
Lighthouse mobile
54
92
MFA coverage
~60%
100%
SaaS apps
21
14
Monthly IT cost
~$2,950
~$2,120
Local Vancouver IT support is the difference between “ticket #492 in queue” and “fixed before lunch.”
Lessons that travel to other Vancouver SMBs
Discovery is cheap; cleanup is the expensive part. Spend a week on the 1-page diagram first.
Move hosting last only if it is healthy; if it is the source of pain, move it first.
The boring stuff — MFA, backups, password manager, monthly review — drives the largest measurable wins.
A local partner cuts the elapsed time by half. Time zone matters more than people admit.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need an in-house IT person, or is a Vancouver IT consultant enough?
For most Vancouver small businesses (under 30 staff), a fractional IT consulting relationship is far cheaper and far more effective than hiring. You get strategy, vendor management, security, and on-demand support without the full-time payroll. See our IT consulting service.
How long does an IT consulting engagement usually last?
Most engagements are open-ended monthly relationships with a two-week trial. Project-based engagements (cloud migration, security hardening, website rebuild) run from 2 to 8 weeks depending on scope.
Do you work with our existing tools, or do we have to switch everything?
We work with what you have first — Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, QuickBooks, HubSpot, your existing host. We only recommend changes when the cost-benefit is clear and documented.
Do you support remote and hybrid Vancouver teams?
Yes — most of our clients are hybrid or fully remote. We focus heavily on identity, secure access, device hygiene, and cloud-first collaboration so that remote work is safe and fast.
How fast can you respond when something breaks?
Same-business-day response on every plan. Critical-impact tickets (site down, suspected breach) get priority and a real human in your time zone, not a ticket queue offshore.
Want a similar 90-day plan for your Vancouver business?
30-minute call. We will pick the three highest-leverage moves you could make this quarter — and tell you which two to ignore.
