A quick, honest note before we get into it.
Most "free IT reviews" you see advertised are a soft sales pitch dressed up as an assessment. The provider comes in, finds a list of scary things, presents you with a shocking summary, and then sells you the solution. The review's not really the point. The pipeline is.
Ours works differently. The one-off free "second opinion" IT health check is scoped narrowly and deliberately — a real, no-pressure review with real Australian numbers behind it, not a scare-based sales tactic.
Why we run it
Because the market data justifies it. 89% of Australian ransomware victims are small-to-medium businesses. The average small business now pays around $56,600 to recover from a single incident, per ASD's own reporting. Businesses still on a solo operator or a legacy reactive provider carry meaningful exposure they usually can't see. A structured review with sourced data is a legitimately useful thing to offer.
What the second opinion actually includes
- A 60-minute discovery conversation — how you work, what hurts, what you're hoping to sort out.
- A technical review of the environment — the same look-under-the-hood we'd do for a proper client, in shorter form.
- A written summary — scored, plain-English, with the specific findings you can act on.
- A shortlist of the top 3–5 things to fix, ranked by cost and risk.
- A "would we recommend switching provider" statement, honestly.
What the second opinion isn't
- A quote. You get findings, not a proposal.
- A pressure conversation. If we end the review by suggesting you stay with your current provider and fix a couple of things, that's a legitimate outcome.
- A bait-and-switch. The scope is bounded. The offer is bounded.
- A stealth audit where we quietly log every metric to hound you with later. We don't do that.
Where the second opinion sits, honestly
It's a door, not a track. Ongoing strategy work — vCIO-style thinking-partner sessions, quarterly business reviews, roadmap planning — is reserved for managed clients. That's fairer for both sides: consulting work that nobody's really paying for tends not to get the attention it deserves. See the "second opinion is a door, not a track" article for the reasoning.
Who it's built for
- Businesses on a solo IT operator who suspect they've outgrown it.
- Businesses on a legacy reactive provider where "reactive" has stopped being enough.
- Businesses about to onboard a bigger client and need to know if they're evidence-ready.
Book your free second opinion. One conversation, one review, one summary — no pipeline pressure.
Book your free second opinion