What six years as a KC-10 crew chief taught me about ownership, and why every Circle Square client has a named engineer.
At Circle Square, every client has a primary engineer who owns the account. One person who knows the environment, knows the people and answers for it. People ask where that came from. The short answer is the flight line.
Before I started this company, I spent six years in the U.S. Air Force as a KC-10 crew chief at McGuire Air Force Base. Three rules governed the work. Every aircraft has an owner. Every job is signed for. Nothing leaves until the checklist is done.
Those are process rules. They’re also rules about people, and they shaped how we built Circle Square.
What ownership does to the way you work
On the flight line, you check everything and you assume nothing. When an aircraft is yours, you answer for it. That changes behavior in ways a policy manual can’t.
You don’t skip the panel you’re tired of opening. You open it, because if something is wrong behind it, you’re the one who answers for it. You don’t assume the last shift checked it. Maybe they did. You check anyway, and you sign for what you checked.
The KC-10 had redundancy built into nearly everything. Redundancy only matters if someone verifies it works. A backup system nobody inspects is extra weight. Ownership is what turns a good design into something you can trust.
A signature is a small thing. It’s also a promise that a specific person looked, knew what they were looking at and stands behind it.
How a lot of IT support works
Most IT support is built around a queue. You call or email. Your problem becomes a ticket. Whoever is free picks it up.
That engineer may never have seen your environment. They may not know why your server was set up the way it was, which vendor your accounting software depends on or what your office manager has been working around for months. They solve the ticket in front of them and move on. Tomorrow someone else picks up the next one and starts fresh.
Nobody in that model is doing anything wrong. They’re working the queue, which is what the system asks of them. The gap is that nobody owns the whole picture. When I meet a new business, I often find years of closed tickets and no one who can explain how everything fits together or what would happen if a key system went down tomorrow. That isn’t anyone’s fault. It’s what happens when nobody’s name is on it.
A person, not a queue
So we built Circle Square around a person. Your primary engineer knows your environment, your people and how your business makes money. When something changes, they know what it touches. When something breaks, they already know what normal looks like, so they can see what’s different.
We’re careful about who that person is. We match engineers to clients by industry experience, so the engineer supporting a law firm understands how a law firm works. We also match by capacity. We won’t overload a tech, because an engineer stretched across too many accounts can’t really own any of them.
That doesn’t mean one person does everything. There’s a help desk, monitoring and a team behind every engineer. But one named person is accountable for your account, the way a crew chief is accountable for an aircraft. They open the panel. They check instead of assuming.
An engine builder who signs his work has every reason not to cut a corner. Same idea.
Why we grow this way
It’s a harder way to run an IT company. We grow only as fast as we can give every client a real owner. I’d rather do that than stretch good people thin.
I think it’s part of why some of our clients have been with us since we opened almost six years ago, and why we haven’t lost one. That’s the result of a lot of people signing for their work every day.
On the flight line, the work wasn’t finished because the shift ended. It was finished when the checklist was done and somebody signed for it. That’s how we try to run Circle Square, and I’d be glad to have any business owner hold us to it.
One standard. Every client. The door is always open.
See how we work: understand it, plan for it, engineer the risk out, stand behind it, with one named engineer who owns your account. circlesquareconsulting.com/how-we-work