I’ve spent years running Microsoft 365 environments and the surrounding business systems for organizations that needed real security and operational discipline but couldn’t justify a full enterprise IT department. That’s the gap North Pointe Solutions exists to fill.
On any given day, my work spans Microsoft 365 administration across multiple tenants, security hardening and incident response, CRM administration (Salesforce, Monday), data migrations, automation work in Zapier and Power Automate, and the broader fractional IT leadership work — vendor management, roadmap, the things a CEO or COO needs an IT director to handle but doesn’t want to think about themselves.
What I believe about IT
Most security problems are configuration problems. The Microsoft stack is genuinely capable of defending an organization — but only if you actually configure it. Default tenant settings are not security. The wizard is not a strategy. I treat “set it and forget it” as a failure mode, not a feature.
Documentation is the deliverable. If I configured something for you and you can’t see what I did or why, I haven’t done my job. Every engagement ends with documentation your team can actually use — or that the next person can pick up if I’m hit by a bus.
Honest scoping beats padded estimates. I’d rather tell you something will take eight hours and have it take eight hours than quote you forty and pad. That kind of trust compounds; the alternative doesn’t.
Vendors should earn their renewals. A lot of fractional IT work is just holding the people you already pay accountable for what they said they’d do. I’m happy to be the technical voice in your vendor conversations.
The unglamorous work is the work. Most of what makes IT actually run isn’t the migration project or the new platform rollout. It’s licensing audits, automation glue, data cleanup, the quarterly review where you decide what to stop paying for. I take that work seriously because it’s where most of the leverage actually is.
Phone the user before destructive containment. Most security alerts are false positives. An aggressive auto-response that locks out a real user during legitimate travel is worse than the false positive itself. Real incident response is patient enough to verify before it acts.
Background
Based in Wake Forest, NC, working with organizations across the US. Public Trust eligible. An experienced operator with a long career running IT for small and mid-sized organizations — the kind of operator who’s actually configured the things he’s talking about, not just read about them.
In my current IT Director role at a professional services / education company, I administer multiple Microsoft 365 tenants, lead tenant security and incident response, and own the broader technology stack — from identity and endpoints through CRM, automation, and business systems. Recent work there includes a full Google Workspace to Microsoft 365 migration, lifting Secure Score from 45% to 85%, running response on 10+ incident investigations across credential stuffing, W-2 phishing, and brand impersonation campaigns with zero accounts compromised, recovering $33K+ in licensing waste, and leading a CRM platform migration that brought 65,000+ contacts forward and identified $58K+ in annual cost reduction.
Before founding North Pointe Solutions, I held IT and operations roles across professional services, manufacturing, and insurance restoration — administering Microsoft environments, network and firewall infrastructure, and the unglamorous IT operations work that keeps small organizations running. The thread running through all of it is the same: building the technical foundations that let small organizations operate like grown-up ones.
Adjacent capability
My background also covers email marketing operations (Pardot, Mailchimp, deliverability tuning), WordPress administration and Cloudflare-level web infrastructure, virtualization (Hyper-V, VMware), traditional network and firewall work (Barracuda, SonicWall), and the general business operations work that comes with running IT for small organizations. If your engagement touches any of those, we can talk about whether it’s in scope. The four services above are where I do my deepest work; the rest is supporting capability when an engagement needs it.
Where I’m not the right fit
I’m not an MSP, not a software developer, and not the right person for hardware procurement, structured cabling, or running a help desk. If those are what you need, I’m happy to point you toward people who do them well.
What I do is run Microsoft 365 the way it should be run, keep business systems healthy, automate the work that should be automated, and help small and mid-sized organizations make sound technology decisions. If that’s what you need, let’s talk.