by Scott Jack
Content Contributor, E-N Computers
More than a decade of experience in technical support including end user support, mobile device management, application deployment, and documentation.
Cathy Guske has worked at the Virginia chapter of the American Institute of Architects, or AIA Virginia, for 22 years. In that time she’s watched the organization move from a historic building downtown to a castle on Monument Avenue to, eventually, no office at all — and she worked with the same IT company through most of it.
It wasn’t a bad relationship. But it had become too comfortable for her provider and not comfortable enough for her.
“Every year we would get a new contract and the bill would be higher and higher and higher,” she said. “And we were not getting anything.”
The previous provider was reactive. If something broke, AIA Virginia called. If nothing broke, there was no communication. AIA Virginia got no check-ins, no planning meetings, no guidance on what was coming. Cathy had relationships with individual engineers, but she never heard from the owner of the company, never had an account manager, never got a look ahead at what the next year might require.
“They kind of took us for granted for being longtime clients,” she said. “Things changed so much in the world and we were changing how we worked.”
The organization was already moving toward a leaner model. After years of running an architecture museum and publishing a trade magazine, AIA Virginia had trimmed down to a core staff of three full-time employees supporting a statewide membership. Paying $6,000 a month for office space when everyone was increasingly working from laptops didn’t make sense, especially after the pandemic.
They needed a technology partner who could support a small, remote team without an office to anchor it.
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How did a Virginia non-profit go fully remote and gain a strategic partner?
After meeting an ENC team member at an industry event, AIA Virginia found a strategic IT partner that monitors and fixes problems early and keeps an open line of communication. Now they enjoy regular check-ins, proactive support, a client dashboard showing the status of open tickets, and a regular hardware upgrade schedule that fits their budget.
E-N Computers had a plan from the beginning
Cathy’s boss met someone from E-N Computers at a Virginia Society of Association Executives event. Cathy was tasked with investigating.
What set E-N Computers apart was the structure they laid out from the start: regular meetings, forward-looking guidance, and a clear approach to hardware planning and budgeting, all things AIA Virginia had never been offered before.
“We never had regular meetings before,” Cathy said. “So, for at least our first two to three years, we had monthly meetings with our account person.” She’s worked with the same account manager at ENC, Amy Birckhead, since day one.
The price was a bit lower at the start, too. But Cathy was aware that the billing would grow — and that the growth made sense. “Of course, we realized that it wasn’t adequate. So now we pay way more. But we need it all.”
“It was a pretty easy decision,” she said.
No office meant figuring out remote support from scratch
AIA Virginia signed on with E-N Computers in March 2022, shortly before the organization went fully remote. The timing meant the two transitions happened close together — getting a new IT partner and dropping the physical office they’d always been supported in.
The staff went home with laptops and docking stations. They were able to eliminate servers and their VPN after migrating to online services. E-N Computers scheduled individual tech appointments with each user to make sure printers connected, Zoom linked to Outlook, and everything that needed to work did.
The adjustment took a little time — not technically, but logistically. For a couple of years, Cathy found herself reminding her account manager that there was no longer an office to send a technician to.
“Amy, you can’t send somebody to the office. There’s no office,” she said with a laugh.
They eventually worked out a rhythm: scheduled remote sessions where technicians log in to each user’s machine, with Cathy coordinating to minimize disruption.
‘We have it down now. We schedule it and I make sure I’m definitely available.’
— Cathy Guske, Member Services Director, AIA Virginia
Hardware is managed on a three-year refresh cycle, with one new laptop rolled out roughly every six months to spread the cost. E-N Computers orders the machines, has each user fill out a form describing what they need, configures everything before shipping, then does a one-to-two-hour remote appointment to get the user fully set up. The last time old laptops needed to be retired, Cathy’s boss brought them to the E-N Computers office in Waynesboro on a trip through the Shenandoah Valley.
It’s a two-way partnership
Day-to-day support is mostly routine: printers that drop their connection after a Windows update, display issues when a laptop wakes from sleep, scanning that stops cooperating. (“Scanning is our nemesis,” Cathy said.)
But E-N Computers has trained the AIA Virginia team to self-triage before opening a ticket — check whether the issue affects everyone or just one machine, run any pending updates, do a full reboot. Cathy estimates this handles about half the problems before they escalate.
What stands out to her isn’t how fast a ticket gets resolved. It’s billing transparency, proactive strategic support, and not feeling talked down to when she asks questions.
Billing took some work to get transparent. Cathy reads her invoices carefully and isn’t shy about asking what a line item means. “Can you explain why two of us have this but the third one doesn’t?” she’ll ask, whether by email to Amy or in a ticket. “It’s not a window, it’s a fenestration,” she says, comparing it to architecture. “Can we just call it a window?”
The middle and upper management at E-N Computers — Kevin and Regina in particular — are willing to back up and explain without talking down to her. Now she knows what she’s paying for. Her monthly bill runs about $1,600 covering three users, and when a new service is proposed, she gets a clear explanation and a quote her boss can sign off on.
“I’ve never felt talked down to. It’s like, wait, can you back up and explain why we need that or what that does for us?”
— Cathy Guske, Member Services Director, AIA Virginia
She also has a client dashboard and access to IT Glue, the documentation system E-N Computers uses, where she can see her team’s tickets, device warranties, and license information. She noticed recently that a coworker had submitted a support ticket from Wyoming while on vacation. “She shouldn’t be checking her email on vacation. But I caught it.”
The structure of the meetings has changed over time: monthly check-ins in the early years, now every two months plus an annual business review. Ian typically joins the annual meeting. Yesterday’s annual meeting included two senior engineers — Kevin and Henry — alongside the account manager. For a client with three supported users, that level of attention stands out.
“It seems like you always bring your best people to the meetings,” she said.
‘They wanted to know about our software. Software they’d never touch.’
Cathy points to one meeting as the moment things clicked. It was the first annual business review after the organization went fully remote — held over Zoom, with Ian, Amy, Regina, and Kevin all present. They started asking questions she’d never been asked by an IT company before.
What are your goals? What do you anticipate for hardware in the next few years? Where is the business heading?
Then Kevin mentioned he’d looked into the association management system AIA Virginia was considering — a software platform E-N Computers would have no role in managing and no financial stake in.
“You looked at a software platform that we’re going to use that you never have to do anything with,” she said. “So but yeah, having somebody do that.”
The annual reviews since then have followed the same pattern: data on what’s been coming into the ticket queue, where the organization can improve its security score, what hardware decisions are coming up. Guidance presented as guidance — “you don’t have to get here right now, we can do this in steps” — with room to push back or decline.
“I don’t think there’s been any time where we felt like they were forcing us to do something,” she said.
“Before it was just like, oh, something broke, can you fix it? And that was the whole relationship. And now it’s just so much more.”
— Cathy Guske, Member Services Director, AIA Virginia
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E-N Computers is a managed IT services provider based in Waynesboro, Virginia, serving businesses across Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, and the Washington, DC metro area. The company works with professional associations, financial firms, law firms, defense contractors, and other organizations that need reliable, proactive IT support. Learn more at encomputers.com.
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