Most agencies will not tell you this part. I would rather you find out now than three months into a contract neither of us should have signed.
Buckeye is built for a specific kind of customer. We are very good at it. We have done it for 23 years. That focus is why our retention is what it is and why the clients we have stayed with for a decade or more keep referring people who look like them.
It also means we are wrong for a meaningful number of the buyers who reach out. I would rather say that on a public page than waste your time on a discovery call dressing it up.
Here are the situations where we are usually not the answer.
A 10-person office on one cable circuit can get most of what they need by calling Spectrum or AT&T directly and using a $25 Microsoft 365 plan. They do not need an MSP and they do not need an advisor. They need a working internet connection and a phone they can answer.
My model is overhead for that company. They are better served by going direct, or by working with a local IT shop whose pricing matches their scale.
Where the size threshold actually shifts: around 25 to 50 employees, two locations, or a single location with serious compliance requirements. That is where the cost of doing it yourself starts to exceed the cost of a good advisor.
If your decision criteria is the lowest line-item price and that is the whole conversation, you are going to lose every comparison we run. The commodity carriers and the volume MSPs will undercut us on the spreadsheet. They should. That is their model.
My pitch is value over a 3-to-5 year window: the audit that catches the $1,800 a month of billing errors nobody else noticed, the contract language that costs you $30,000 if you do not flag it before signing, the redundancy you do not need until you really do. None of that wins on a single-page TCO table.
If you want to evaluate us correctly: add up everything you spent last year on carrier issues, downtime, IT cleanup, and surprise renewals. Compare that to our line-item quote. Then we can have an honest conversation.
Buckeye is carrier-neutral. That is the whole point. If you want a master agreement with one Tier 1 carrier that owns everything from your internet to your phones to your security stack, we are not the right shop. The big carriers will be happy to sell you that. I will not.
My job is to keep you out of vendor capture, not to put you into it. If you want capture, hire the carrier directly. They are good at it.
My cell number is on every contract. I am in every kickoff, every QBR, every escalation, every renewal. Some buyers love that. Some find it overbearing.
If you want IT and telecom to be a portal you log into, a ticket queue you never speak to a human in, an account manager who rotates every 14 months and never reads the file, that is not what we build. There are plenty of large vendors who do exactly that. Some of them are great at it.
If you are an ISP, a competitive local carrier, a satellite reseller, or a broadcaster, you have specialty needs that require specialty advisors. There are very good firms for those segments. We are not one of them.
A 50-to-500 employee Ohio business with at least two locations or one regulated environment. You have a real network, real compliance pressure, and at least one person internally who cares about getting it right. You value transparency over the lowest line-item quote. You want one accountable person you can call, and you do not mind if that person calls back personally to walk you through a contract.
If that sounds like you, the audit is free and the conversation is honest. If it does not, the rest of this site has a few hundred articles you can read for free, no obligation to talk to anyone.
Talk to Jonathan. 15 questions. Takes about five minutes. I review every submission personally and reply within one business hour.
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