An IT executive on your leadership team, at a fraction of the cost.
A full-time CIO costs more than most 10 to 200 person firms can justify. The questions a CIO answers don't go away because the salary doesn't fit. Someone still has to own the roadmap, the budget, and the risk. That's the vCIO engagement.
What a vCIO actually does
Managed IT keeps today running; the vCIO decides what next year looks like. The engagement puts an experienced IT executive, one who has run technology inside a federally chartered bank and a major capital markets firm, at your leadership table on a fractional basis. Not a sales engineer with a quota, and not a helpdesk lead promoted into strategy: an operator who has defended budgets, survived audits, and made build-vs-buy calls with real money attached.
Strategy and budget
12 to 36 month technology roadmap
Where the firm is going, what technology gets it there, and in what order. Sequenced against your growth plans, lease dates, and hiring, so decisions are made ahead of need instead of after failure.
Annual IT budget, defended line by line
Every line has a reason attached: what it buys, what happens without it, when it recurs. Refresh cycles, license true-ups, and project spend stop arriving as surprises.
Build-vs-buy analysis on major decisions
New CRM? Self-host or SaaS? Because we also build and operate platforms, the analysis comes from someone who has lived both sides, and who is not paid a commission on either answer.
Quarterly business reviews
A working session with leadership: what happened, what it cost, what is at risk, what is next. You leave each QBR with a current roadmap and a decision list, not a slide deck of green checkmarks.
Risk, security, and compliance
Security posture reviews
Reviewed against a written baseline, with a remediation plan ranked by real risk to your firm, not a scanner dump of 400 undifferentiated findings.
Cyber-insurance readiness
Underwriting questionnaires now demand MFA everywhere, tested backups, and EDR, answered under penalty of a denied claim. We prepare the answers, close the gaps behind them, and keep the evidence file current.
Policy drafting
Acceptable use, access control, BYOD, offboarding. Written to fit how your firm actually works, so they get followed instead of filed.
Vendor due diligence and contract review
Renewals, new platforms, and "our software vendor got acquired" moments get reviewed by someone technical who has sat on the buyer's side of enterprise negotiations.
How the engagement runs
vCIO is a standing engagement, typically layered on managed services: the QBR cadence anchors it, the roadmap and budget are living documents in between, and the vCIO is in the room (or on the thread) whenever a technology decision has money or risk attached. Most firms consume it as a predictable monthly retainer, a fraction of one executive hire, without the recruiting risk.
FAQ
Who owns your technology roadmap today?
If the answer is "nobody, really," that is the gap this engagement closes.