Every Circle Square client has one engineer who owns the account. Here’s why we run it that way, and what it costs us to keep it.
Every Circle Square client has a primary engineer who owns the account. It’s one of the first things I explain to a new client, and it’s the commitment I hear about most from the clients who’ve been with us longest.
It sounds simple. In practice, it shapes almost every decision we make about how we hire, how we grow and when we’re ready to bring on the next client.
What gets lost in a handoff
A lot of IT support runs on a queue, and there’s a good reason for that. A queue is efficient. You open a ticket, it goes to whoever’s free, and the work gets done. Nobody in that system is lazy. It’s built for throughput.
The cost shows up in the handoffs. You start every call with “our setup is a little unusual.” You explain which systems you run and why the accounting software lives on that one machine. The issue gets fixed, the ticket closes, and next time someone else picks it up. Two people make slightly different assumptions, and their fixes work against each other. A change that made sense on its own breaks something only the last person knew about.
Those costs are small at first. Then, usually at the worst possible time, the person who understood your setup isn’t the one who answers.
Every aircraft has an owner
I learned a different model on the flight line. I spent six years as a KC-10 crew chief at McGuire Air Force Base, and the rule was plain: every aircraft has an owner. Every job is signed for. Nothing leaves until the checklist is done.
You knew whose airplane it was, and that person knew every inch of it. If something was off, there was no question about who would find it and who would answer for it.
I’ve always admired engine builders who sign a plate on each engine they finish. Years later, you can open the hood and the name is still there. That’s the feeling we want a client to have about their account.
How we choose the person
Your primary engineer knows your environment, your people and why things are set up the way they are. They know which systems your business can’t run without and what an hour of downtime costs you. When something changes, it goes through someone who understands what it touches.
We’re careful about who that person is. Where we can, we match an engineer who already knows your industry, because every industry has its own software, its own rhythms and its own busy seasons.
We also look at capacity. We won’t hand an account to an engineer who’s already carrying as much as they can carry well. Ownership only means something if the owner has room to do the work.
Behind that engineer is the rest of the team, including a help desk with 24-hour coverage available and monitoring that runs around the clock. One person can’t answer every call at 2 a.m. But one person is accountable for the whole account, and the work runs through someone who knows it.
The tradeoff
This model is slower to grow. A queue lets you add clients by adding seats. Ownership means we can only grow as fast as we can develop engineers ready to own an account, and each of them can only carry so many.
We’ve made our peace with that. Growing at the pace we can do the work properly is a big part of why, almost six years in, we’ve never lost a client.
This is No. 3 in the Circle Square Standard, the ten commitments every client can hold us to: every client has a person.
When your systems go down, you shouldn’t have to introduce yourself. The person on the other end should already know who you are and what’s at stake. If that sounds like what you’ve been missing, or you’re just curious how it works day to day, I’m always happy to walk you through it.
One standard. Every client. The door is always open.
See how Circle Square works with every client: understand it, plan for it, engineer the risk out, stand behind it. circlesquareconsulting.com/how-we-work