By Lee Evans, Head of Customer Success
A while back, I tried explaining to a customer what their first year with us would look like. I’m not talking about the shiny sales pitch. I mean the real stuff: what happens in week one, who you’re actually talking to in month three, and what we need from you to make it work. I wanted to show them what “done” actually looks like.
The problem was, I couldn’t point to anything. We didn’t have a map. We had nearly a decade of doing great work, but very little to show the shape of that work from the customer’s side of the table.
That didn’t sit right with me. Without a journey to show people, we were just asking them to take our word for it. And “taking our word for it” is exactly what a good MSP should be moving away from.
We had been running our own race.
Here’s the honest reality: as we grew, we naturally built walls. We added Customer Success, Project Management, Engineering, and Support. Every team is fantastic at what they do, but they’d all developed their own bubble—their own priorities and their own idea of what mattered most to the customer, based only on the slice of the relationship they touched.
We realized we were like marathon runners all in different lanes. We were all sprinting toward the same finish line, but nobody could see each other’s pace or where they were on the course. We were working hard, but we didn’t have a shared map.
You can get away with that for a while, but it doesn’t scale. It creates that “bumpy” feeling customers get during handoffs, even when everything else is going fine.
So we actually sat down and mapped it.
During our recent offsite in Tulsa (we’re NYC-based!), we got everyone in one room and asked every team to describe the customer journey from start to finish. Not just their part, but the whole thing, from that first sales call to onboarding, all the way through to being a long-term partner.
Then came the hard part. We put those versions side-by-side. We looked at where they matched, where they clashed, and where there were gaps that nobody was actually owning.
Out of that came the first unified picture of what a “perfect” engagement looks like. We broke it down into phases, with each step having a name, an owner, and a clear definition of “done”. No more guessing whose job it is.
The handoffs are where trust is won or lost.
If I had to pick one thing this exercise exposed: we’re great at the work, but we needed to get better at the seams between the work.
A project finishes, but the context doesn’t always travel to the next team. The Service Desk inherits a client but might miss the “why” behind the relationship: why they left their last provider or what specifically frustrates them. Sometimes things got redone just because the info didn’t flow downstream.
This doesn’t happen because people don’t care; it happens because there wasn’t a shared definition of the handoff. You can’t fix a handoff you haven’t drawn. Once we drew it, the fixes were obvious.
Telling isn’t showing.
The map also showed us how much of the experience is just managing expectations. The difference between a customer feeling in control or just along for the ride isn’t usually the tech work—it’s whether they know what’s coming next.
Ambiguity is stressful. It creates that low-level anxiety of “who do I talk to?” A customer who knows the route, even when the path is steep, is a customer who trusts you.
For years, we just explained this on calls. That’s okay, but it’s a lot to remember. We can do better than telling. We can show.
Building the map into the work.
This is the part I’m most excited about. This isn’t just an internal project anymore.
We’re building this map directly into our systems so expectations live in the workflow, not just in our heads. We’re separating what happens behind the curtain from what you actually see, meaning you get a live view of your journey. The goal is simple: you should be able to log into our platform and see exactly where we are, what’s done, what we may need (from the customer), and what’s next. No more waiting for a status update; you own the view.
That’s the kind of “managed IT” we believe in. It’s not just doing the work; it’s making the work clear to the person paying for it.
We’re early, and that’s the point.
I’m not going to pretend this is 100% finished. We have the map, but we’re still making calls on the finer details and figuring out how to keep it from drifting as we grow. We’re being deliberate about it rather than just claiming victory.
What’s changed is that we’re no longer guessing in private. We have one playbook. Now we get to run it, learn from it, and get 1% better every time. That compounding improvement is what eventually creates an experience that’s impossible to beat. Don’t let perfect get in the way of good enough.
Where We’ve landed.
For a long time, the journey at Advisory was real but invisible. We walked it with every client, but we never drew the route. Drawing it forced us to look at our own seams and commit to showing you the path instead of just asking for your trust.
If you’re looking for an IT partner, ask this: “Can you show me what working with you looks like, start to finish?” A year ago, we couldn’t give you a straight answer. Today, we’re building the tools so you can see it for yourself.
That, to me, is what a real partnership should feel like from the very first conversation.
