One of our offices is located just off Route 9 in Hadley, Massachusetts, and the other is on the 7th floor of the One Mercantile Building in downtown Worcester, Massachusetts.

What sets us apart from other managed service providers (MSPs) is our unwavering commitment to combining expert technology solutions with a personalized, client-focused approach. Unlike other MSPs, we pride ourselves on our proactive strategy to prevent issues before they arise, rather than just reacting to problems.

At Paragus IT, we differentiate ourselves through our four unique aspects:

1. 100% Employee Owned: Every employee has a stake in the company, which means we're all invested in delivering the best service possible.

2. Dedicated Client Teams: We provide personalized attention to each client by assigning dedicated teams that truly understand their needs and goals.

3. Strategic Approach: We don't just solve immediate issues; we take a strategic approach to align IT with our clients' long-term business objectives.

4. Making IT Fun: We believe that work should be enjoyable, so we infuse fun into everything we do, from our company culture to our client interactions.

At Paragus IT, we understand that every business is unique, which is why we offer customized IT solutions that fit your specific needs and goals. Our team of highly skilled professionals is dedicated to providing exceptional support and ensuring your technology infrastructure runs smoothly and efficiently.

Moreover, our commitment to community involvement and exceptional service is evident through our initiatives, such as the Firehouse Cook Off, which reflects our dedication to building strong relationships and fostering a positive impact beyond just IT services. This holistic approach ensures that our clients receive not only top-notch technology solutions but also a partner who genuinely cares about their success and well-being.

We sure do. After 20 years in this business, we have found that assigning just one person to your account isn’t enough. We want you to feel like our team is an extension of yours, and to do that, we need to make sure we are covering all the bases.

For our Fully Managed Clients, your team will consist of:

Account Relationship Manager (ARM) – There job is to make sure that you are getting everything you need from your partnership with Paragus. They aren’t commissioned salespeople who are trying to sell you the flavor the month, nor do they use a bunch of techno-jargon and confusing terms. Their job is to work with the rest of your team to translate your needs into a plan and then make sure that plan is executed. They will be checking-in with you at least once a month on a pre-scheduled time but are also available to you whenever you have a question or need. Fundamentally, their accountability is to your total and complete satisfaction.

Network Manager (NM) – This is the man or woman behind the scenes who is making sure everything in your environment is secure, compliant, and reliable. They are responsible for all of your patching, updates, monitoring, security, and routine health checks.

Client Support Manager (CSM) – This amazing individual is going to make sure that your experience with our Client Support Department is incredible. First, they are going to create incredibly detailed documentation. This includes comprehensive checklists of everything that needs to happen when you onboard an employee, offboard an employee, or purchase a new workstation to detailed information about your line of business applications, printers, and other devices our team will be supporting. After that’s done, they are going to carefully monitor all of the cases our team works for you, trying to spot patterns or trends that we need to look into and opportunities where we could improve our documentation.

For our Co-Managed partnerships, you will have some combination of the team above based on the relationship you have with us.

There are! While some smaller firms have a pool of generalist all working together to try and tackle everything, over the past 20 years, we found that by having different departments that could specialize on specific areas, we could provide better service to our clients. Today, Paragus has 4 distinct departments.

Client Support - This is where we provide on-demand support to address the issues that are immediately impacting your business. This is the largest department of Paragus and it is further broken into small teams of agents who work specific types of cases. This design allows us to ensure that we solve your issue as fast as possible with the fewest number of hand-offs.

Compliance and Security – This department is made up of our team of Network Managers who oversee all our clients IT environments. They are automatically assigned cases by our system daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annually. From checking up on your backups to running scans, reviewing monitoring, updating diagrams and documentation, and running compliance checks, this team keeps our clients’ networks secure, reliable and compliant.

Client Strategy – Home to our Account Relationship Managers, or ARMs as we call them, this team is responsible for making sure our clients have a good IT plan that aligns with their business, have a resource they can go to with high level questions, and know that someone is overseeing everything we are providing to make sure that nothing is slipping through the cracks.

Projects – This dream team of amazing project managers, traditional Project Engineers and Automation Engineers handle all of the non-day to day work for your business. From an office move to automating a process, this team does it all and every project is overseen by a project manager to ensure it is done on-time, on-budget, and on-scope.

Onboarding - Each new relationship begins with onboarding as we want to make sure our team is setup correctly from the start to provide you with consistently exceptional service.

Health Check – Immediately following your onboarding, we conduct a comprehensive health check of your entire network. We’ll assess your security, disaster recovery, business continuity, capacity for automation, reliability, and performance. This allows us to make sure that both parties are starting off with a clear picture of the current state on the environment.

On-Ramp Presentation – Once the onboarding and health-check are complete, we meet to review what we call our On-Ramp. Ultimately, we will be working with you on an annual basis to create and update your 3 year IT Road Map as well as your Annual IT Plan, however, the On-Ramp is a short term plan to carry us from the end of the onboarding through to the first Annual Strategic Planning Meeting where those other tools will be created. At this On-Ramp meeting, we will review all of your short-term priorities along with what we learned during the Health Check. From there, we’ll work with you to decide what you would like to see addressed by our team in the next 3-9 months.

Monthly Alignment Meetings – Once a month, at a set date and time, your Account Relationship Manager will meet with you to check-in on where we stand with your On-Ramp or IT Plan, review anything that the members of your dedicated client team wanted to bring to your attention, check-in on how things have been going, share any relevant news, trends, or other information that might be relevant to your business, and most importantly, find out if there is anything else you or your team needs from us.

Annual Strategic Planning Meeting – This is a two-part meeting that takes place once a year. We generally schedule it to align with whenever your team is generally beginning to plan and budget for the next fiscal year. The first meeting is all about listening and learning. We want to know what your plans are for the next year and learn about any challenges and obstacles you might encounter. Armed with all of that information we then get busy putting together a high-level 3 Year IT Roadmap as well as a comprehensive 1 Year IT plan and budget. We also do another Health Check to assess what progress has been made since the last one. Once everything is ready to present, we setup a second meeting to walk you through what we have put together, collecting your feedback and making adjustments as needed. In the end you’ll have a good plan of how IT is going to hep your business achieve its goals over the next 3 years as well as a detailed budget and plan for the coming fiscal year. You’ll know exactly what to expect so there are no unwelcome financial surprises throughout the year.

For customers, selecting an IT vendor can be a daunting and overwhelming task. At the same time, getting the right partner is critical to both the success of your business, but also so that you don’t have to go through the process again! However, what some people may not realize is that it is just as important for us to only bring on the right clients. Therefore, we have designed our sales process in such a way to make it as easy as possible for both parties to effectively evaluate if this is going to be a good long-term partnership.

Discovery Call - Our process starts with a 30-minute call on Teams or Zoom. During this call we are going to ask you a whole bunch of questions that will very effectively help us to identify if we are not the right fit for you. At the end of the call, if we know that we aren’t going to be the right partner, rather than wasting any of your time, we’ll simply let you know and will happily recommend someone who we feel is a better fit. If on the other hand we see the potential to add value and address your concerns, then we’ll pull out our calendars and schedule our next meeting.

Fit Assessment Meeting – This is where we get to come to your office, meet some of your team, take a look around and get to know you a bit better. It is also the meeting where we will present to you a high-level overview of who we are and talk through the basics of how our pricing works.

Paragus VIP Tour – If we are both still feeling like this could be a good fit, we’ll invite you to one more meeting at one of our offices. Here you’ll meet some of the team you’ll be working with, get to check-out our digs, and get a better sense of who we are. At this meeting we’ll review a final proposal and answer any lingering questions.

Paperwork – I know, no one likes paperwork, but it’s important to make sure that everything we’ve discussed is properly documented so that everyone’s expectations are clear. Once completed, you are officially a member of the Paragus family and the onboarding process begins!

Our onboarding process is all about setting up our relationship for success for many years to come. The entire process is managed as a project by our project management team and is primarily executed by the three members of your dedicated client team.

It all starts with a sales to ops handoff meeting where everything you have already shared with us throughout the sales process is shared with your dedicated team. From there, your team will be handling the transition from your current vendor, deploying our tools, collecting a lot of documentation, working with you to establish who all your key people are and who is authorized to do what, as well as doing a comprehensive health check of your entire setup.

Once complete, we’ll present you with our On-Ramp tool. Think of it as a short-term strategy. It will include all of the tasks, initiatives and projects that you want to have us address before your first Annual Strategic Planning meeting.

With that plan in-hand, our onboarding process concludes with a check-in by a senior member of our team to collect any feedback and make sure that the relationship is off to a great start.

As you can imagine, it is a process that we have now done hundreds of times. Our goal is to make it seamless, fast, and easy. We will work with your team to schedule a transition kick-off call between our team and your outgoing IT partner.

During this call we’ll review everything that needs to happen, collect as much information as we can, and then send out a clear list of to-dos for everything else. Our Project Manager will outline a timeline based on that call, documenting who is going to do what and when, and then stay on-top of all the key players to make sure we are staying on-track. The entire process typically takes about 30 days.

Yes. In almost every case, we ask that there is 30 days of overlap between whomever is handling your IT today and Paragus. This means that their last month is our first month, giving us enough time to fully onboard you and complete the transition.

We don’t. We believe that the onboarding is our investment in a long-term relationship. To be totally frank, if you were to leave Paragus within the first 2 years of working with us, we’d probably actually lose money. We aren’t looking to be a transactional vendor, we are only looking for clients who are seeking a long term partnership. And for the right fit, we are happy to make the upfront investment into that partnership.

Generally speaking, when it comes to support, during the first 30 days, your staff will continue to send requests to your current IT provider. This allows our team to get our tools deployed and collect documentation to ensure we can provide a great experience.

When it comes to projects, initiatives, or other special requests outside of day-to-day support, we generally like to wait to start anything until we have completed your On-Ramp, which is generally between 60 and 90 days from the start of the relationship. However, we can make exceptions for very time sensitive needs that simply can’t wait.

Given how critical the onboarding process is and how much time we invest in them, we do limit the number of clients we can onboard at any given time. That does mean that at times a new client onboarding might be scheduled 2-3 months out in the future. However, there are other times of the year when we can take a new client on at the start of the next month. If you are thinking of making a change, the best thing to do is start the process early so that we can work with you to try and hit the date you are shooting for.

We really can. There are three ways we can help.

First – Reduce the number of issues you have. MSPs love to talk about how quickly they resolve issues, and while that is incredibly important, nothing beats not having an issue at all. Our team is going to analyze your cases to look for opportunities to reduce the number of interruptions to your business and your team. We do this by looking for every opportunity to simplify the environment, provide training where needed, and get rid of root issues. We’ll even track our progress and show you how we are doing.

Second – Building a strategy. If you know what to expect and when to expect it, you’ll spend a lot less time reacting and more time doing what matters. We’ll help to make sure you have a clear plan, a detailed budget, and are regularly kept abreast of anything new. That way you will spend less time worrying and more time executing.

Third – Very unique to Paragus is our expertise around Automation, AI and Business Intelligence. Our team can help you find those opportunities where a simple automation, a basic mobile app, or a sleek new dashboard could save time, money, improve decision making, reduce errors, or in some cases, all of the above.

We sure do. As an employee-owned company who is looking to build raving fans as opposed to just acquiring customers, we stand behind everything we do for our customers. We aren’t perfect, but when we do make a mistake, we’ll always do the right thing and make it right. And, unlike most of our competitors who rely on long term contracts to make sure their clients can’t leave, our agreements have no such term. If we aren’t performing, our clients can cancel their agreement for any reason at any time with just 90 days’ notice.

The common traits across our clients is that the majority of their staff depend on technology to do their job, they are in an industry that has sensitive data, and they are generally within 90 mins of one of our offices. Beyond that, we work best with businesses who are growing and who are looking to leverage technology to make their business better. It also doesn’t hurt if you like dad jokes.

On average our clients work with us for about 7 years, however we have many clients who have been with us for much longer.

While we are proud of our extremely high Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Client Satisfaction Scores (CSAT), at the end of the day, we think nothing beats hearing from them directly. You can read testimonials here, and if you are serious about becoming a Paragus client, we’d be honored to make personal introductions to businesses in your industry.

We think it all starts with having really happy, really engaged employees. At Paragus, not only have we built an amazing culture, we are 100% owned by our employees. This means that our staff are committed to taking care of our clients. The other secret to our success is listening. We ask for feedback and we truly listen to everything out customers say. That feedback goes straight to our leadership who are constantly trying to find ways to improve our service and create an even better experience for our clients. Don’t believe us? One time a client said that the only way we could improve our service was if Morgan Freeman recorded our phone tree. Did we actually do it? Give us a call and find out!

While we hate saying goodbye, sometimes in business it is inevitable. Businesses close, they sell to larger companies, and sometimes they grow so large, we aren’t a good fit anymore. Outside of those external factors, sometimes during a change of ownership or leadership, we can become part of a cost cutting measure. Ironically, some of those clients do end up coming back to us. At the end of the day, we are looking for raving fans, not hostages. If a client isn’t happy or it simply isn’t the right fit, we’ll do everything we can to either make it right or help them migrate to another provider.

Of course. Most changes can be made with as little as 30 days’ notice, sometimes even less.

Almost never. As an employee-owned company, when it comes to serving our clients, we feel like nothing beats the local touch. The only two exceptions are when we need to quickly get boots on the ground in a city where we don’t have a presence or the team that we have partnered with to provide 24/7 monitoring of our client’s security. 

In the case of clients who need support outside of our territory, we have partnered with a firm who can put boots on the ground almost anywhere in the US within 48 hours, and when it comes to major cities, typically within 6 hours. These resources will be our eyes, ears, and hands on the ground, but they will be working directly with one of our employees every step of the way.

For our 24/7 security monitoring, this task is simply too big and too important for us to handle exclusively in-house. Given that almost 80% of all alerts are false positives, there is a mountain of data to sort through to know when action is needed, and when it isn’t, and time is of the essence. We work with a much larger firm that ensures that any potential incident is carefully reviewed within minutes of being detected and that if it is actionable, that our team is alerted immediately so that we can address the situation.

We take the trust that our clients place in us very seriously. From meticulously scrutinizing our own security to ensuring that we have several layers of redundancy, we have done everything imaginable to ensure that our clients can depend on us. God forbid there ever was a situation, however where for any reason we were not available to support our clients, we are more than happy to put all of your critical passwords and documentation into escrow with a trusted third party.