A month on the plan
It happened — 2026StrongDM — onboarding statistics 2026
The day a company's IT quality becomes visible to everyone is the day a new person starts — and this year's onboarding research says it usually goes badly: up to 39% of starters report their tools weren't set up properly, and 70% of new hires decide within the first month whether the job was the right call.
Your version is fourteen people and, for once, no crisis — just a month of ordinary work. A designer starts Monday. A dock will die on the 17th, the way docks do. Four small things will go wrong and be fixed before they become stories. This case is simply what you're buying with the monthly fee, told as four weeks.
This is you if You're hiring, and last time the laptop arrived a week late; you pay for IT ad hoc and every invoice is a surprise; you'd like to know what “managed” actually means.
How we run it
Week one: the new designer works from nine o'clock.
You told us she was coming; that was your whole job. Her account came off the role template agreed at onboarding, so she has exactly what a designer needs and nothing more. Her laptop arrived imaged, encrypted, enrolled and signed in. First day's work on the first day.
Week two: the quiet hum.
Four tickets — a feral mail rule, a VPN that sulks on guest WiFi, two “this is slow” laptops — all closed remotely inside the response promise. This is the fair-use rhythm the plan prices in: about an hour and a half per user per month, averaged over the quarter, and most people use none of it.
Week three: the thing a wire can't fix.
The dock dies and takes a monitor with it. An engineer is on site the next day — same-day is the target in central London — swaps the dock, and pulls a clicking drive before it becomes a different case study. Hardware goes through the Fixfactor workshop.
Week four: the month, on one page.
What broke, what we did, what we removed permanently — this month, a mail-rule pattern traced to a phishing attempt your MFA had already blunted. Plus one line looking forward: two autumn hires, so two laptops go on the quote now. The invoice holds no surprises, which is the whole relationship in a sentence.
Made boring by: this entire month. Fourteen people on Professional is £966 a month, one number to call — against the hidden payroll of DIY IT and the £85/h emergency rate for everything above, unplanned. Professional · £69/user/month
Real research: onboarding statistics, 2026. The fourteen-person firm — and the designer — are illustrative.