IT support & consulting · Madison, Wisconsin

IT support and IT consulting for Madison businesses that don't want a vendor relationship.

Independent IT support, IT consulting, managed services, and cybersecurity for Madison businesses. Built around a knowledge-economy city: insurance HQs, biotech startups, healthcare adjacencies, and the small and mid-sized firms working alongside them. No quota culture, no account managers, no enterprise sales overhead.

// Service mix

IT support
IT consulting
Managed services

// Drive time from HQ

~50 min
Hwy 12 → Beltline

// Sweet spot

5–50 employees
Knowledge-economy fit

// Contact

(262) 220-7884

Book a discovery call →

// The Madison thesis

Madison isn't Milwaukee. The IT problems aren't the same.

Madison is a knowledge-economy city. The University of Wisconsin employs over 21,000 people. Epic Systems employs more than 10,000. UW Health adds another 10,000-plus. American Family Insurance and CUNA Mutual run insurance HQs that drive the financial services layer. Promega, Exact Sciences, Illumina, and University Research Park anchor a biotech corridor. About one-third of the regional workforce is in some form of government, education, or healthcare.

What that means for IT: Madison's small and mid-sized businesses don't exist in isolation. They're vendors to UW Health, contractors for state agencies, suppliers to Epic-orbit healthcare systems, spinoffs from UW research labs, professional services firms for insurance executives, and consultants embedded in biotech pipelines. Their IT requirements get shaped by what their customers and partners demand. Generic MSP playbooks don't cover it.

We work for the small and mid-sized businesses adjacent to these anchors, not the anchors themselves. The Epic-adjacent vendor managing PHI in a side workflow. The biotech startup scaling from 8 people to 40 with a Series A pending. The insurance broker preparing for a carrier security audit. The state government contractor whose IT environment has to pass procurement standards. These businesses need IT that's built to be audited, documented, and defensible — not just functional.

// Where we actually deliver value in Madison

Four sub-markets we know how to support.

Not every Madison business is a fit for every MSP. These are the four sub-markets where our model maps cleanly to what the work actually requires.

Insurance & financial services

Independent agencies & financial advisors

Madison's insurance presence is anchored by American Family and CUNA Mutual but the independent agency ecosystem is enormous. We support agency AMS deployments (Applied Epic, AMS360, EZLynx, HawkSoft), the cybersecurity controls that carrier E&O underwriters increasingly require, and the documentation that gets requested mid-claim or during a renewal.

See insurance IT →

Healthcare adjacency

Epic-adjacent vendors & small clinics

If your business touches UW Health, Epic, or any of the major Madison healthcare systems as a vendor, contractor, or referral partner, you live under their security expectations. We handle BAA-required IT environments for small clinics and the Epic-orbit vendor security posture: documented access, MFA enforcement, secure exchange, and the audit trail your partners ask for.

See healthcare IT →

Biotech & life sciences

Early-stage biotech & URP-orbit startups

Biotech companies scale non-linearly. You're 8 people one quarter, 25 the next, suddenly answering pharma due-diligence questionnaires the quarter after. Cloud-first builds, identity-as-perimeter, documented controls, and a cybersecurity posture that holds up to a Series A diligence call. This is the right IT model for University Research Park-orbit companies.

See cybersecurity →

Professional services

Law firms, accounting & consulting

Madison's professional services layer is dense: law firms practicing in state and federal courts, accounting practices serving the insurance and biotech corridors, management consultancies embedded with state agencies and large employers. The IT requirements are document security, matter or client-level access controls, encrypted file exchange, and the kind of compliance posture professional E&O insurance now expects.

See legal IT →

Across Dane County.

Service area within flat-rate distance of our Whitewater office. If you're inside the Beltline or in a Dane County suburb, you're in territory.

Madison core

Downtown / IsthmusCapitol SquareEast SideWest SideSouth SideNorth SideUniversity Research ParkEast Washington corridor

West suburbs

MiddletonVeronaFitchburgCross PlainsMount HorebBlack Earth

East & north suburbs

Sun PrairieCottage GroveWaunakeeDeForestWindsorMarshall

South & toward Whitewater

MononaMcFarlandStoughtonOregonBellevilleEdgerton

// How we're different

What you actually get with a two-person MSP.

Most Madison MSPs

Sales rep on the front end
Account manager between you and the techs
Dispatcher routing tickets
Junior tech handles your day-to-day
Senior tech for escalations only
Quarterly business reviews on PowerPoint
Pricing built around metro overhead
Quota-driven upsell cycle

BadgerLayer

Riley or Anton picks up the phone
No account manager layer
No ticket queue or dispatch
Both technicians know your environment
Same person who built it answers the call
Honest conversation when something needs attention
Pricing built around our actual cost
No sales team, no quota, no upsell pressure

Questions Madison businesses ask.

Questions we hear from Madison owners, office managers, and operations leads evaluating whether an independent MSP is the right fit.

Book a discovery call →

What's the difference between IT support, IT consulting, and managed IT?

IT support is reactive: something breaks, you call, we fix it. Billed per incident or hourly. IT consulting is strategic: you have a decision to make (vendor selection, network redesign, compliance posture, cloud migration, security assessment) and you need an independent expert opinion that's not tied to selling you a product. Managed IT bundles both into a flat monthly fee with proactive monitoring, patching, backup, and the day-to-day support that prevents most problems from happening in the first place. Most Madison businesses end up wanting all three things, but they often start with one and discover the others matter too. We offer them as a single relationship rather than three separate vendors.

Do you support Madison businesses that work with Epic or UW Health?

Yes, but with an honest caveat. We don't manage Epic itself. That's Epic Hosting's job and your internal healthcare IT team's job. What we do support is the long list of Madison businesses that interact with Epic and UW Health as vendors, contractors, referral partners, or adjacent service providers. Those businesses live under their partners' security expectations: BAA-required documentation, MFA-enforced identity, documented access controls, secure file exchange, and a cybersecurity posture that holds up when a hospital's vendor risk management team sends a questionnaire. We handle that side. If you're an Epic-orbit vendor and your current IT can't answer those questionnaires confidently, that's exactly the gap we close.

Why pick a Whitewater-based MSP over a Madison one?

Two real reasons. First, accountability. Madison MSPs above a certain size have an org chart between you and the technician: a sales rep on the front-end, an account manager who's your "single point of contact," a dispatcher routing tickets, a junior tech handling your day-to-day work, a senior tech you only meet during escalations. We're two technicians, both on every account. You call (262) 220-7884 and you reach Riley or Anton. Second, cost structure. Madison MSPs build their pricing around Madison overhead: West Towne or Old Sauk Road office rent, regional sales managers, quarterly business reviews, layered management. None of that improves your IT environment. Whitewater overhead is meaningfully lower, and that shows up in your flat-rate monthly fee.

How fast can you be on-site in Madison?

Madison is about 50 minutes from our Whitewater office via Highway 12 and the Beltline. Remote response for critical issues is usually within minutes during business hours and within an hour after-hours. On-site response for a true emergency is around 90 minutes from call to door. The honest answer is that most production IT issues resolve faster remotely than on-site anyway, regardless of where the technician starts. For planned on-site work like hardware deployments, cable runs, and network installs, we schedule Madison days in advance and batch the work efficiently.

Do you work with biotech and life sciences startups around University Research Park?

Yes. Early and mid-stage biotech is one of our better fits because the work pattern matches our model. Biotech companies scale non-linearly: you're 8 people one quarter, 25 the next, you sign a partnership with a pharma major and suddenly you're answering vendor security questionnaires that assume an enterprise IT department exists. We build for that trajectory from day one: cloud-first deployments, MFA-by-default identity, documented access controls, automated patching, immutable backup, and the cybersecurity posture that lets you answer a Series A due-diligence call without scrambling. We don't replace your internal IT person if you have one; we work with them.

Are you actually an IT consulting firm or just an MSP that calls itself one?

Both, intentionally. The IT consulting work we do is independent and not tied to any specific product or vendor commission. If we recommend you stay on your current firewall instead of buying a new one, that's what we say. If we recommend you move from a $500/month MSP arrangement to break-fix support because you don't need full managed services, we'll say that too. We're small enough that nobody's career depends on closing your deal a specific way, and that changes the conversation. Most Madison "IT consulting" is dressed-up sales for hardware or service contracts. We're trying to do the actual consulting part.

What does IT support cost for a Madison business?

Three pricing models, depending on what you actually need. Hourly IT support for project work or break-fix runs $125-$175 per hour with no minimum. Managed IT services for ongoing support runs $300-$500 per month flat-rate for a typical 10-person professional services office, more for environments with manufacturing, multi-site networking, or specialized line-of-business systems. IT consulting engagements are quoted as fixed-scope projects. We quote after a 30-minute discovery call so the number reflects your actual environment, not a guess based on employee count.

Can you take over from our current Madison IT provider?

Yes. Transitions typically run 2 to 4 weeks. We document what we inherit, install our management tools, transition email and backup services as needed, train your team on how to reach us, and coordinate with the outgoing provider when possible. The goal is that on the day of cutover, your staff's workflow doesn't change. What changes is the response speed, the documentation, the monthly bill, and the size of the org chart between you and the technician fixing your problem.

An honest 30-minute conversation about your Madison business.

No sales pitch, no PowerPoint, no follow-up from an account executive. Just a structured discovery call about your current setup, what's actually working, what isn't, and whether an independent MSP fits the way your business runs.

Call (262) 220-7884 Send a message