IT consulting is paid advice and design work that ends in a written deliverable, which is a different thing from a managed services agreement that keeps your systems running day to day. RJ2 Technologies is headquartered in Deer Park, Illinois, has served businesses since October 1998, and works across Chicagoland, Rockford and Northern Illinois, southeastern Wisconsin and northwestern Indiana. A consulting engagement here usually starts with one of four situations: a server or a building lease is running out, an insurer or a customer is asking questions nobody can answer in writing, an expensive software or infrastructure decision is on the table, or the company has grown past whatever arrangement got it this far.
What does IT consulting actually mean for a business in Rolling Meadows?
It means hiring someone to answer a specific question and write the answer down, on a defined scope, with a beginning and an end. It is not the same purchase as ongoing support.
The northwest suburbs are not a generic market and the IT questions here are not generic either. Rolling Meadows sits between Arlington Heights, Palatine and Schaumburg, a few minutes from the Elk Grove Village industrial park, which is roughly 5.4 square miles and about 3,600 businesses sitting next to O’Hare. That mix produces a specific kind of client: small and mid-sized manufacturers, distributors and third-party logistics operations, plus the professional services firms, medical and dental groups, and back offices that sit along the Golf Road and Woodfield corridors.
What those businesses call in about is fairly consistent. A manufacturer has a network that grew one switch at a time as the plant grew, and now half of it is in a closet with no ventilation and nobody knows what the unlabeled fiber run goes to. A distributor has warehouse wireless that drops handheld scanners in the same three aisles. A professional services firm just got a cyber insurance renewal questionnaire with 40 questions on it and does not know how to answer eleven of them. A company that has quietly doubled in size is still running the arrangement it set up when it had twelve people. A business is moving buildings and has 90 days.
None of those are support tickets. They are decisions, and they benefit from somebody who is paid to look and then leave.
When should you hire a consultant instead of a managed provider?
Hire a consultant when you need a decision made well. Hire a managed provider when you need things to keep working. Most companies eventually need both, and plenty of firms, RJ2 included, do both. Consulting work at RJ2 is done by its team of project engineers, led by Shawn Meyer, Director of Professional Services. The distinction still matters because it is what you are actually buying.
A consulting engagement is the right purchase when:
- You are about to spend real money on something hard to reverse. An ERP replacement, a plant network rebuild, a move, a phone system, a decision to keep or kill the server room.
- You have internal IT and need a second set of eyes, not a replacement. A good consultant working alongside an internal IT manager is the most productive version of this work, and internal IT people are usually the ones who ask for it.
- Somebody outside is asking for documentation. An insurer, an auditor, a customer’s security questionnaire, a bank during a transaction. These require written evidence, which is a deliverable.
- You are evaluating your current provider and want an assessment from someone with no stake in the answer.
- You are buying or selling a business, and someone has to find out what the other side’s IT actually is before it becomes yours.
An ongoing managed agreement is the right purchase when the problem is operational rather than strategic: patching, monitoring, backups running and being tested, a help desk people can call, security tooling that somebody watches. That work is continuous by nature and does not end in a document. The range of it is laid out on the services overview.
The honest failure mode is buying the wrong one. A managed agreement will not tell you whether to replace the ERP. A one-time assessment will not keep the backups running.
What does an IT consulting engagement produce?
A deliverable you can hand to a banker, an insurer or a board, and act on without the consultant in the room. If the engagement ends in a conversation and a verbal recommendation, you bought a meeting.
A serious engagement should produce most of this:
- An asset and application inventory. Every server, switch, firewall, access point and endpoint, with age, warranty or support status, and what it does. Plus the applications, their versions and their vendors.
- A network diagram that matches the building. Not a stock template. Where the equipment physically is, what connects to what, where the internet comes in.
- A risk list, ranked, in plain language. Not a severity score with no explanation. What could happen, how likely, what it would cost to stop.
- A prioritized roadmap with sequence and cost bands. What to do in the next 90 days, what waits for the next budget year, what depends on something else being done first.
- A refresh and budget forecast, usually three years out, so hardware stops being an emergency purchase.
- Written answers to whatever the outside party asked, if the engagement started with an insurance or compliance questionnaire.
The test of the deliverable is simple. If you fired the consultant the day it was delivered, could somebody else pick it up and execute it? If not, it is not finished.
Which IT work actually requires somebody local?
Anything involving hands, cable, physical space, or a bad morning. The list is shorter than most local IT marketing implies, and it is real.
- Server rooms and racking. Somebody has to stand in the room, look at the airflow, follow the cable, and read the labels that are wrong.
- Cabling and drops. Pulling cable, terminating it, and fixing whatever the last vendor did is physical work by definition.
- Wireless in a warehouse or on a plant floor. Coverage in a building full of steel racking, machinery and concrete cannot be designed from a floor plan. Somebody walks it with a device.
- Moves. A building move is a hard date, a truck, and a weekend, and it does not go well over the phone.
- Cutover weekends and deployment days. Migrations, new hardware, the first Monday after a change. The first two hours of that Monday produce more tickets than the rest of the month, and most of them are 90 second fixes that turn into 20 minute fixes remotely.
- The genuinely bad day. A device that will not boot, a failed circuit, a ransomware event. When it is bad, remote hands are not a substitute for somebody who can be in the building.
That last one is the honest argument for a local provider, and it is worth stating plainly rather than dressing up. Being nearby does not make the routine work better. It changes what happens on the days that are not routine.
Which IT work does not need anyone local at all?
Most of it, and pretending otherwise is how clients end up paying for proximity they never use.
Monitoring, patching, remote help desk, Microsoft 365 and cloud tenant configuration, identity and access work, license review, backup verification, security policy, vendor evaluation, most of a security assessment and nearly all of the roadmap work are done from anywhere. They have been for years. A provider in Rolling Meadows and a provider in another state do this identically, and the difference between them is competence and responsiveness rather than mileage.
So the useful question is not “are you local.” It is “which parts of this engagement need somebody in my building, and will that person actually come.” A provider who cannot answer the second half is selling a map pin.
For the record on our own footprint: RJ2 is headquartered in Deer Park, a short drive north of Rolling Meadows. Engineers working downtown use a drop-in space at 333 S. Wabash Ave., Suite 2700, which is a working space rather than a staffed office, and we do not present it as one. RJ2 is a long-time member of the GOA Chamber of Commerce and the Schaumburg Business Association, and Jeff Dann sits on the Board of Directors of the Chicago Better Business Bureau.
What should you ask before hiring an IT consultant here?
Five questions, and the answers should be specific.
- What exactly do I get at the end, and can I see a redacted example? A real firm has one.
- Who is doing the work, and what have they done like this before? Not the salesperson’s résumé.
- Is this engagement priced as a fixed scope, and what makes it grow? Scope creep on a consulting engagement is the most common complaint about the category.
- If the recommendation is to buy something, who profits? A consultant with a stake in the answer is not disqualified, but you are entitled to know before the recommendation, not after.
- Will somebody come to the building, and when? Ask which specific steps happen on site.
The reason to weight tenure here is that this work is judgment, and judgment comes from having been wrong before and remembering it. RJ2 has been operating in the northwest suburbs since 1998, through several generations of what businesses in these suburbs were told was mandatory. That is a checkable claim, and it is worth more than a superlative.
Frequently asked questions
What is IT consulting?
IT consulting is a defined engagement that produces written advice or a design: an assessment, inventory, network diagram, risk list, roadmap or vendor recommendation. It ends in a deliverable rather than in ongoing support, which is what a managed services agreement provides.
What is the difference between an IT consultant and a managed service provider?
A consultant is hired to answer a question and deliver a document. A managed service provider is hired to run and maintain systems continuously: monitoring, patching, backups, help desk and security. Many companies use both, often from the same firm, but they are different purchases.
When should a small business in the northwest suburbs hire an IT consultant?
Before a large or hard-to-reverse decision, when an insurer, auditor or customer requires written documentation, when internal IT needs a second opinion, when evaluating a current provider, or during a move, an acquisition or a period of fast growth.
Does an IT consultant need to be local?
For some work, yes. Server rooms, cabling, warehouse and plant floor wireless, building moves, cutover weekends and hardware deployment all need somebody physically present, as does a genuinely bad day. Monitoring, patching, cloud configuration, policy and roadmap work do not.
Where is RJ2 Technologies located?
RJ2 Technologies is headquartered at 21660 W. Field Parkway, Deer Park, IL 60010, in Chicago’s northwest suburbs, and has served Chicagoland and Northern Illinois businesses since October 1998. Engineers working downtown use a drop-in space at 333 S. Wabash Ave., Suite 2700, which is a working space rather than a staffed office. Corporate: 847-303-1194. Support: 847-303-1193. The remote support desk runs 7:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. Monday to Friday and 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Saturday, Central Time, and monitoring runs 24/7.
What does an IT consulting engagement deliver?
Typically an asset and application inventory, a network diagram that matches the building, a ranked risk list in plain language, a prioritized roadmap with sequence and cost bands, and a multi-year refresh forecast. The test is whether someone else could execute it without the consultant present.