A seat at the table without the $280K salary.
Fractional CIO services for Phoenix businesses that need strategic IT leadership. Roadmaps, budgets, risk reporting, vendor strategy. Without hiring a full-time executive. We bring the discipline a 200-person company deserves, scaled to your size.
Reactive IT is expensive. Strategic IT is a multiplier.
Most SMBs do not have a CIO. They have a managed services contract, a server room, and a vague sense that something is overdue. A vCIO is the person whose job is to know what.
No strategy = no leverage
Without a written 12–36 month roadmap, every vendor decision is reactive and every renewal is a fire drill. A documented strategy lets you negotiate from a position of intent, not desperation.
IT spend is opaque
You know what you pay your MSP. You probably don’t know your true all-in IT cost. Licensing, hardware refresh, training, security stack, telecom. We give you the number, and the lever to move it.
The board is asking about cyber
Owners, lenders, insurers, and acquirers are asking sharper questions about cybersecurity posture. “We have antivirus” is not an answer. We translate technical posture into board-ready risk language.
Growth breaks ad-hoc IT
Whatever IT setup got you to 30 employees breaks at 60. Acquisitions, new offices, remote-by-default, regulatory expansion. These are vCIO problems, not help-desk problems. Plan, don’t scramble.
Four disciplines, one accountable advisor
A real vCIO engagement is not a sales call wearing a different hat. These are the work streams we run on your behalf. Measured, documented, repeated.
Strategic planning & roadmap
12, 24, and 36-month technology roadmap mapped to your business plan. What systems retire, what get replaced, what get adopted, and in what order. Reviewed quarterly, updated annually.
IT budget & spend management
Annual IT budget built bottom-up: licensing, hardware, services, security, training. Capex vs. opex breakdown. Variance reporting against actuals. The financial discipline a CFO would expect.
Risk register & cyber posture
A maintained risk register: known issues, accepted risks, mitigations in flight, residual exposure. Quarterly review against your cyber-insurance attestations and any regulator-facing controls.
Vendor strategy & oversight
Strategic vendor reviews (not just procurement): are we on the right line-of-business app, the right telecom carrier, the right cloud tier? Annual contract calendar so renewals never sneak up.
Documents that hold up in front of a board.
vCIO is not advice in conversation that evaporates. Every engagement produces specific artifacts. The kind your auditor, your insurer, and your owners can read.
Technology roadmap deck
Visual 12–36 month plan: initiatives in flight, what’s next quarter, what’s deferred. The single source of truth when an owner asks “what are we doing with IT this year?”
IT operating budget
Line-item annual IT budget with capex and opex broken out, vendor by vendor. Reviewed quarterly against actuals. Hand this to your accountant or your bank and it stands up.
Risk register
Maintained log of known IT/security risks, owners, mitigations, and decision history. The artifact cyber-insurance underwriters and compliance auditors ask for by name.
Executive risk report
Plain-English quarterly summary: incidents, near-misses, posture trend, compliance status, what changed and why it matters. Sized for a 10-minute board agenda slot.
Pick the cadence that matches your stage
Three tiers, monthly billing, no setup fee, cancel with 30 days’ notice. All include the four work streams above. The difference is depth and cadence.
- Quarterly Business Review (4/year)
- Annual roadmap + annual budget
- Risk register reviewed annually
- Email/Slack for strategic questions
- One ad-hoc strategy call per quarter
- Monthly strategic meeting (12/year)
- Quarterly roadmap updates + annual budget
- Risk register maintained continuously
- Vendor strategy reviews (2/year)
- Board-ready quarterly executive report
- Cyber-insurance attestation support
- Weekly strategic engagement + office hours
- All Standard tier deliverables
- Active M&A IT due-diligence support
- Cyber-insurance annual posture review
- Custom board reporting cadence
- Crisis-mode access (incident, vendor failure)
All tiers include the four core work streams (strategy, budget, risk, vendor). Project hours billed at $115/hr (matches Plan 8 / Prime rate). Inventive Prime clients have vCIO Embedded included with the contract (no separate billing). Other tier upgrades available at the published rates.
Strategic IT context shaped by your regulator
Your vCIO speaks the framework your board and auditor care about. Every industry, its own playbook.
From first conversation to operating cadence in 90 days
Strategic conversation
One hour with a vCIO, no slides. We map your business plan, current IT state, and the gap. You leave with three concrete recommendations whether you hire us or not.
Strategy doc + baseline
Initial roadmap, baseline IT budget, risk register v1, and a vendor inventory. You see the artifacts we will maintain on your behalf, with first-quarter actions already in motion.
QBR, repeat, evolve
Quarterly business review with leadership, monthly check-ins per your tier, annual budget refresh. The cadence is the product. Disciplined, documented, never improvised.
Straight answers, no consulting theater
How is vCIO different from managed IT?
Managed IT is operations. Keeping the environment running, support tickets, patching, monitoring. vCIO is strategy. What to build, what to retire, what to budget, how to report risk to the board. They are complementary disciplines. Most clients pair vCIO with our Managed IT Services or Inventive Prime, so the strategy and the execution live under one roof and one accountability.
Do we need to also hire you for managed IT?
No. We offer vCIO as a stand-alone advisory engagement and we work alongside your existing internal IT team or another MSP. About a third of our vCIO clients keep their current operator and use us purely for the strategic layer. The strongest value is when you pair vCIO with our Managed IT, and Inventive Prime includes vCIO Embedded with no separate billing. We are not in the business of fighting your current partners. We are in the business of getting your IT to do what your business needs.
Who is the actual vCIO assigned to us?
A named senior engineer with at least 10 years of strategic IT experience. Not a junior tech wearing a vCIO badge. You meet them on the strategic conversation call. If there is a mutual fit, they are yours for the engagement. Backup coverage is documented so you are never without an advisor when they are out.
How do we know we are getting our money’s worth?
Every quarter we deliver four specific artifacts: updated roadmap, refreshed risk register, variance against budget, and an executive risk report. If we cannot point to those documents at any time, we are not doing the job. The deliverables are the proof.
What if our needs change mid-year?
Tiers move up and down with 30 days’ notice. Most clients start at Lite or Standard and move up when an event (M&A, audit, board change) increases the strategic load. Moving back down when things stabilize is fine too. VCIO is a function, not a flex tax.
Will the vCIO sit on our board or attend leadership meetings?
For Standard and Embedded tiers, yes. Quarterly board attendance is included on Standard, and Embedded includes regular leadership meeting attendance. We do not vote, we do not take board fiduciary roles, and we do not act as a director. We attend in an advisory capacity, the way a CFO advisory firm or outside counsel would.
Do you handle cyber insurance applications and renewals?
Yes, that is one of the highest-value vCIO outputs. We translate your technical posture into the carrier’s questionnaire language, defend the answers in calls with underwriters, and refresh the documentation annually for renewal. Clients routinely see premium reductions or coverage increases when a documented vCIO posture replaces a self-attested checkbox.
What does the contract look like?
Month-to-month is the default, with 1-year and 3-year terms available. The 3-year locks in pricing. The rest of the engagement is identical. Inventive Prime clients already have vCIO Embedded included with their contract, so there is no separate vCIO bill at all. Other tier upgrades are available at the published rates.
One hour. Real strategy. No pitch deck.
A strategic conversation with a real vCIO. You leave with three concrete recommendations and a sense of whether the chemistry is right. We can build from there, or you keep the recommendations either way.
Pairs operationally with Vendor Management (day-to-day vendor ops) and Hardware Maintenance (fleet program). vCIO sets strategy, those execute on it.