Michigan Metrology: A Total Technology Confidence™ Case Study

Don has run Michigan Metrology for over 30 years. Like most business owners, he isn’t in the computer business — but after three decades of trial and error with IT providers, he learned that every business is an IT business. Today, Don describes his relationship with technology in one phrase: Total Technology Confidence.

The Challenge

Before partnering with Concise, Don cycled through a string of IT providers billed by the hour — support that only showed up once something had already broken, and even then competed for attention against bigger, more lucrative accounts.

“The IT supplier could be working on a $10,000 project, and yours is 300 bucks. Which one are they going to work on?”

There was no redundancy built in. A failed hard drive meant tracking down an identical replacement before anything could be restored. Backups, where they existed at all, lived on stacks of DVDs. If the internet went down, the business simply stopped.

Finding a True Technology Partner

Don’s search wasn’t just for competent IT — he wanted a provider who was technically excellent and genuinely good at running a business, a combination he found surprisingly rare.

“Sometimes you get these super tech guys, but they don’t know how to treat customers. Then you get the pure business guys who really don’t want to take care of you, they just want your money. You put that together and you’ve got a special person.”

Don called Concise on Labor Day, 2016. Jeff answered. What sealed the partnership wasn’t a sales pitch — it was watching Jeff personally troubleshoot a corrupted program by digging line-by-line into the code, live on the phone.

Building Total Technology Confidence™

Working with Concise, Don’s vision of never having to worry about his technology again became real infrastructure:

Redundant internet: A failover connection so an outage from one provider never takes the business offline.
Bare-metal backup and recovery: The ability to restore a fully working system onto brand-new hardware, not just recover files onto the machine that already existed.
Duplicate, staggered systems: Two main computers running at all times, one generation behind the other, so a hardware failure never means a full stop.
Proactive lifecycle management: Aging hardware flagged before it becomes a liability, rather than waiting for it to fail.
Meticulous documentation: Every device, serial number, and configuration logged and current.

Trial by Flood: Total Technology Confidence in Action

In April 2019, a flood destroyed Don’s office. A Concise technician was on-site within minutes, confirming the backup drive — sitting in the path of dripping water — was already secure. Within about a week, Don’s entire business was restored onto a loaner system at the Concise shop, where he ran his company from a workbench while his office was rebuilt.

When Don’s insurance company sent a technical consultant to verify losses, Concise’s documentation stopped the process cold.

“The computer expert guy they brought in looked at me like he’d never seen anything like this. He just hit a button — here’s everything that’s there, and what it would cost. The insurance company didn’t challenge a thing.”

Concise also insisted on completely rewiring the office rather than reusing water-exposed cabling — a call that looked unnecessary at the time, but was vindicated three years later when corrosion from the same flood began causing intermittent alarm failures in an adjoining office Concise hadn’t yet touched.

The Results

Minimal downtime in nearly a decade, compared to days-long outages under previous providers.
Full recovery from a total office flood, with the business running again within a week.
Insurance claims processed without dispute, thanks to documentation the adjuster’s own technical consultant called unlike anything he’d seen.
Redundancy across every critical system.
24/7 support Don has relied on for years, with response times he describes as consistently faster than expected.

In Don’s Words

“Qualitatively, I just put in peace of mind. That’s the whole point. It’s like an insurance policy with a support element to it.”

“I always tell people: these aren’t my computers, they’re Concise’s computers — they’re just letting me use them. When they need to be updated, we spec it out and get it done.”

“I tell people all day long: don’t ever worry again. Total Technology Confidence, peace of mind — that’s what you want. You’re in your business. You’re not in the computer business.”

Ready to stop worrying about your technology? Contact Concise Computer Consulting and find out what Total Technology Confidence™ can do for your business.