The home-office-to-real-office jump
You signed a lease in Kirkland's Totem Lake district or one of Redmond's office parks. You're hiring. Suddenly IT isn't just your laptop and a VPN — it's a network that needs to serve 5, then 10, then 25 people reliably.
What to get right on day one
Internet
- Fiber if available (Kirkland's newer buildings usually have it, older ones might not)
- Minimum 200/200 Mbps symmetric for a team of 5–15
- Secondary ISP on a different backbone for failover
Networking
- Managed switch and enterprise access point — not a Best Buy router
- VLANs separating employee devices, IoT (printers, cameras), and guest
- Centralized management so you can reboot or reconfigure remotely
Workstations & identity
- Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace with enforced MFA
- Company-owned laptops with remote wipe capability
- Shared drives (OneDrive/Google Drive) instead of local file servers
- A real domain and professional email — ditch the Gmail
Security baseline
- Endpoint detection (not just antivirus)
- DNS-layer filtering for phishing protection
- Disk encryption enabled on every machine
- A written acceptable-use policy (even if it's short)
The growth trap
Most Eastside startups set up IT for 5 people and then change nothing until 20 people are complaining. A 30-minute quarterly review keeps you ahead of the curve: bandwidth trends, license counts, backup verification, and a quick check on who still has access to what.
Why local matters
When you're in a Kirkland or Redmond office and your conference room AV fails 10 minutes before a client demo, "we'll dispatch someone in 2–4 business days" doesn't cut it. We're 15 minutes away and we pick up the phone after 5 PM.