AASSCC is one senior pair of hands across the bits of your business that quietly keep it running. Websites, Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, email and DNS, cyber security, and the Apple and Windows machines your team works on. One person, joined up, on retainer.
AASSCC /ɑːsk/
verb. to put a question, to seek help,
to get the broken thing fixed today.
Also: the initials of my kids,
put together. I’m nostalgic like that.
Six services, one person across all of them. The work is joined up on purpose: an email problem gets fixed in a way that also tidies the DNS, and a website rescue leaves the rest of the stack in better shape than it found it.
For sites that are slow, broken, or impossible to maintain.
Most WordPress problems are boring to diagnose and satisfying to fix. Send over the symptoms and you’ll get back what’s wrong, how long it’ll take, and what it’ll cost to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
The day-to-day running of your technical stack.
The fiddly infrastructure work a growing business needs but cannot justify a full-time head of IT for. On retainer, quietly, so your team can get on with the actual work.
Setup, admin, and the quiet tidying that keeps accounts sane.
Tenant setup, joiners and leavers, shared drives that don’t turn into swamps, MFA rolled out without a revolt, and the sensible security posture underneath it all.
Deliverability that just works, and the awkward moves that don’t.
SPF, DKIM, DMARC, domain transfers, the emails that mysteriously stopped arriving, and a DNS zone that finally reads like it was written by one person rather than six.
Sensible hardening for teams without a security department.
Good security is mostly unglamorous habits done consistently. Practical policies, proper backups, sane access controls, and an honest conversation about what you actually need to protect.
Apple-heavy fleets, mixed estates, and launch-day laptops.
Procurement, provisioning, MDM, and the quiet rebuild when something goes wrong on the Monday of a launch. Cross-platform when it has to be, opinionated when it helps.
A few things people have said on the first call this year. If any of them sound close to home, the fix is usually less dramatic than it feels.
The site’s down and nobody knows why.
Our emails aren’t arriving and a client is getting annoyed.
DNS and email got set up by three different people over six years and now nothing quite makes sense.
We think someone in the team was phished. What do we do now?
We know we need proper security, we just don’t know where to start.
The WordPress site has been nearly fine for a year and it’s getting worse.
The person who set everything up has left and nobody has the passwords.
We’re moving to Google Workspace on Friday and it is not going well.
Any of these? Ask.
Start a conversation →Four ideas that shape every engagement. Expect the first to come up on the first call, and the rest to be quietly doing the work in the background once we’ve started.
Most of the expensive problems in a small business sit in the gaps between web, IT, security, and operations. Having one person who sees the whole picture means the fix lands in the right place, not the nearest one.
In practice: an email deliverability rescue that also tidies your DNS and hardens the domain, in one engagement.
Sites down, accounts locked, inboxes dark, failed migrations, ransomware scares. The tone on the other end of the phone is part of what you’re paying for. Competent, unhurried, honest about what we know and don’t.
In practice: a real assessment inside the hour, and a clear plan before anything gets changed.
Break-fix is expensive and stressful for everyone. Retained support costs less over a year, catches problems earlier, and means the person on the other end already knows how your stack is wired when something does go wrong.
In practice: monthly retainers with a small standing allocation and a clear runway for the bigger pieces of work.
Technical decisions framed as business decisions: what’s the risk, what does it cost, what does it buy you back. No fear-based upselling. No vague invoices. No phrases that read like they were written by a committee.
In practice: short emails, itemised quotes, and an honest no when something isn’t worth doing.
Three recent engagements, presented as brief case notes rather than portfolio shots. Two are client-facing websites. The third is the kind of operations work that never shows up in a portfolio.
Two clients, both on retainer for more than five years. A third slot is held open for a newer engagement once the work has settled.
I couldn’t manage my digital life without you.
I appreciate you every day.
AASSCC is run by one person. A short biography is usually more useful than a long one, so here is the short version.
I’ve spent the last twelve years being the person small businesses call when the digital stack quietly stops making sense.
Before that, a decade inside agencies and in-house teams looking after websites, email, cloud platforms, and the mixed fleets of laptops that the people running the business actually use. The work has always sat across disciplines. I kept noticing that the expensive problems lived in the gaps, so I built a practice around closing them.
I work this way because it’s the kind of support I wish my own businesses had been able to buy when I was younger. One competent person, paid fairly, there for long enough to understand how things are wired, trusted to make sensible calls without a meeting. That’s it.
In practice, working with me feels like a quiet, responsive email thread with someone who already knows your setup. Short messages. Itemised quotes. A phone call when something is on fire, and a plan before anything gets changed. If that sounds useful, the easiest next step is a thirty-minute conversation.
A real human reads every message. Replies typically land within a few working hours, or sooner if you tick the urgent box.
Appendix / for future collaborators
A short reference doc sitting at the end of the site. It is not linked from the primary navigation. It is here so anyone picking this up after me can stay in lane.
British English. Plain, precise, warm. The reader is a competent adult being spoken to by another competent adult. Contractions are fine. Em dashes are banned. Exclamation marks only appear inside direct client quotes. Never “passionate”, never “solutions” as a bare noun, never “partner” as a verb, never “seamless”, “bespoke”, “holistic”, “synergy”, or “end-to-end”. Short sentences land. Longer sentences earn their length by carrying a real thought. Technical decisions are framed as business decisions. The house tone when things are on fire is calm, unhurried, and honest about what we do and don’t know yet.
Editorial, technical, composed, with a bit of personality underneath. Near-black ink (#0B0B0C) as the base, warm newsprint (#EDE7DC) as foreground. A single hot red (#E5332B) lifted directly from the WARNING HOT sticker on the founder’s laptop, used only where it earns attention. A mustard (#E8B43A) signal reserved for micro-labels. Fraunces for display, Inter Tight for body, JetBrains Mono for document furniture. Fine film grain. A 12-column structure that occasionally breaks on purpose. One black-and-white portrait, and no other illustrative imagery. Type is doing all the visual work.
“When the digital stack breaks, ask.” It leans into the domain as a verb without spelling it out, reads as a complete sentence rather than a fragment, and names the moment the buyer is actually in when they arrive on the site. The alternatives (“Senior technical support for businesses that need it to just work” and “The person you call when it has to be fixed today”) both tested as clearer but less memorable. The chosen line does more work per word.
The near-black base is a deliberate move away from the Claude-white / SaaS-grey territory the first pass drifted into. Warm newsprint foreground keeps it from turning into a terminal. The hot red comes off the laptop stickers on purpose — the site should feel a little like the person, not like a bank. Fraunces was picked over a sans-only direction because the name has typographic rhythm already and a considered serif treats that rhythm as a feature.
Pairing a near-black editorial page with the founder’s black-and-white portrait in the hero. It signals the brand promise of the site in one glance: a real, specific person looking back at you, not a logo wall. Everything else in the composition has to earn its place next to that.
The brief allowed a cursor-following accent and a hero type animation as “tasteful details”. I left both out. The composition is already doing the work, and adding motion to a senior consultancy site almost always ages it by a year within a month. I also added a small urgent link in the primary nav, despite being told the nav should stay quiet. On a site whose entire proposition is “call us when it’s on fire”, that link needs to be one click from every scroll position.
/notes. Short-form writing on specific things we’ve fixed or figured out — email deliverability, a particular WordPress gotcha, a Google Workspace migration pattern. A few posts a quarter, not a content-marketing engine.