About Georg Dauterman:
Georg believes in the fusion of technology and creativity. With a background in both fields, he started his career in IT departments of publishing and advertising agencies, realizing the critical need for tech aligned with business goals. Joining Valiant in 2004, Georg’s expertise and passion for efficiency brought industry recognition. He holds a history degree from Queens College and serves on Datto’s Global Partner Advisory Board. Beyond his leadership role, Georg enjoys exploring culinary skills, fitness, and outdoor adventures with his family.
About Megan Quick:
Megan is a member of the Valiant Marketing & Sales team, assisting in demonstrating the value of our services and ensuring positive experiences for prospective clients. When not working with technology, she is a theater production manager and performer, producing her own comedy shows, and is an avid writer. Megan has a B.A. in Theater from Sewanee: The University of The South.
What you’ll learn about in this episode:
- Why onboarding sets the tone for the entire employee or client relationship, and how a strong first impression builds trust, clarity, and long-term mutual respect.
- How small creative agencies can improve onboarding through proactive communication, keeping additional equipment on hand, and aligning processes with IT or internal teams every 3-6 months.
- How to manage IT equipment lifecycle efficiently, with recommended refresh cycles to reduce downtime and control replacement costs.
- Why offboarding is not just an HR task but a critical cybersecurity function that requires clarity, empathy, and rigorous documentation.
- The risks of incomplete offboarding, including unsecured dormant accounts and former employees retaining access to sensitive systems like accounting platforms or email servers.
- Why documented procedures, defined responsibilities, and an accurate inventory of equipment and applications are foundational to secure onboarding, offboarding, and overall IT governance.
Transcript:
Megan Quick:
Hello, everyone, and welcome back to The Creative Stack, a show about the intersection of creativity and information technology. I am your host, Megan Quick, and I am joined by my cohost, the talented and brilliant Mr. George Dauterman, President of Valiant Technology. Hello, George. How are you?
George Dauterman:
Let's be kind today.
Megan Quick:
I'm in a great mood today, but...
George Dauterman:
I love it.
Megan Quick:
... I tell no lies. George, I feel like this is going to be a topic you're going to be really excited about because I've seen you be excited about it just not when we're talking about it on the podcast. It's about how your company could perfect the onboarding and offboarding process.
George Dauterman:
Yes.
Megan Quick:
Yes.
George Dauterman:
It is a topic near to my heart. And so I will say there's no perfecting it. It's a continual improvement.
Megan Quick:
There's a striving.
George Dauterman:
It's a striving to be awesome at this. And even what we do today is so different than what we did six years ago, utterly different. So many things have changed in the past couple of years. Obviously COVID, remote work, hybrid work, it's such a different beast. And I think that generationally people expect to do very different onboarding than I think people in the past would've been more than okay with first week they start work, they just sit down and wait for their training. And I don't think that's susceptible anymore.
Megan Quick:
No, there's a rapidity that's expected now, which I think that's a good thing. And I think... I love hearing you talk about how it's changed and evolved in the last six years, and I know that that's from when I joined the team. And that leads us to the first kind of question I have. When I started at Valiant six years ago, and I think people can tell by how you're already talking about it, you said that, "Onboarding and the quality of the onboarding sets the tone for the relationship." You kind of meant employee or employee, but I also know you mean on a broader scale for MSP's onboarding clients.
George Dauterman:
Yeah.
Megan Quick:
Can you expand on that statement, about the philosophy of that?
George Dauterman:
Fundamentally speaking, it just goes down to that you can't really redo a first impression. And that moment... Let's use the example of a new employee. All of us have had that experience of getting that new job. You're really jazzed and excited and you show up that first day, and then there's no one to greet you. There's no computer. If you do get the computer doesn't have a login. You can't print. Email's not set up. It's missing the signature. All of those things. And I know when we work with customers, some of our onboardings can be like 30 tasks, fairly complicated or what that machine has to be for a new user or if it's a new staff member, but I think there's a broader question. It just fundamentally means when you first start working with someone that first impression matters and everything.
And for MSP, if we're onboarding a new customer, it's a multi-month process. It's this level of getting into the environment, and I'd say modifying it to meet the stack of the MSP and make sure things are working and that we can support it and that the client knows how to report issues. There's so many issues. So, it sets its tone, whether it be onboarding employee, be onboarding MSP. Or even for us, I could tell you right now, nothing is more miserable than you work with a new partner, new vendor, and you're so excited, "This tool is going to really help us. It's going to be so helpful."
Megan Quick:
The sales process is great. Yeah.
George Dauterman:
Right, and then the onboarding's like, "All right, we signed the contract and then we don't know what happens next." And that's a really miserable feeling, so we try really hard not to do that to our customers or the people that work at our customers with us or with our partners because you really just want people to know what's happening and follow a process around that.
Megan Quick:
Yeah. I feel clarity and just knowing what's happening and communication can make all the difference even when nothing is perfect, as you said. There are going to be bumps in the road, but as long as there's visibility, transparency, communication that can really help. You sort of already answered this, I wrote, "How has this philosophy guided Valiant's mission with our clients?" But I just want to point out what you said it's like you know what it's like to be the client who gets wowed and then is let down by the onboarding experience. And I guess, do you feel like this is something you have been refining for the entire time?
George Dauterman:
Oh my God, yes. I can't even express to you, when we first started doing this, we were disastrous at it. Not a lot of checklists, not a lot of automation, not a lot of thoughtfulness of what the experience is like for the employee. Just really refining it over time and trying to make it less traumatic. I don't know if it's the right word to even use, or stressful because I think for most people, I said, most people, the first day of the new job is a really weird day. You show up, you're doing paperwork maybe, you're kind of scared, you don't know what to expect, you don't know anyone per se. So, there's a lot of emotions and a lot of things. And so what we strive to do is to have one thing working the day the person starts, which is they can open their computer up, log in, have their email, have some semblance of what's going to happen next and from a computer perspective.
And then working with our primary contacts with each customer, determining what's their next step in their process and where we can help inject a level of consistency into that is really important. One other thing I think that is like a really good small thing, personal pet peeve of mine, and I have been called out by customers on this. So, when I see it, I correct it, and there's nothing... So, obviously you're not always going to get a new machine. Sometimes you have a machine that someone might've used before. Nothing makes someone feel less important than a dirty computer.
Megan Quick:
Yeah. And some people out there can really muck up a computer.
George Dauterman:
Yeah. It's like if you ever go on a computer and you see crumbs in the keyboard, that's not going to make you feel really good about your spot or anything.
Megan Quick:
Who put them there? It's not me.
George Dauterman:
I've eaten from this computer. And I'd say this has been a place where over the years we've gotten really pretty, I don't want to say militant, but consistent about making sure that those machines are sent out clean. And if they're not, we want to know. So it's a small thing, but it matters a lot.
Megan Quick:
Oh, it's huge. Yeah, absolutely. And you're speaking a lot about the Valiant experience of refining this. If you sat down with an owner of a creative agency, 10 employees or so, and again, we love our list, what three things would you tell them to do to start making a better onboarding experience?
George Dauterman:
Oh, easy. A couple of things. A, as soon as you know you're going to hire someone or bring someone on board, communicate that to all the parties involved. Nothing... Not nothing, but one of the challenges is that when you get the rush, you may not get it right. So, you want to make sure that you have the person's name, their phone number, their title, their applications you're going to need. So, the upfront work to knowing when someone's starting... Look, we all get emergencies, mistakes happen, but for the most part, if you can get as much as you can upfront, you're going to have a much better experience. The second thing I think is that having some spare equipment available so that if things do break or you need it, it's not going to be this disaster area rush, which always was kind of a problem experience.
And last, and this is probably the most important one, is before every quarter or every six months, either work with your internal team or your IT provider, just review, a quick review of what onboarding looks like. One of the things that we found over the years was that when people don't communicate what's happening, "Hey, we had a change. We don't use this tool anymore..." I'll give you a really dumb example: "We want this to be our default font," which doesn't sound like a big deal, but if you work with creatives, that font is really critical.
Megan Quick:
Huge deal.
George Dauterman:
Huge deal.
Megan Quick:
A lot of assumptions are made.
George Dauterman:
About that font. Should be the right font and it should be the default font and it should be set correctly. That's really important to let us know versus it and working... Not either us or whoever you're working with. Because it's these subtle small things because if a person... So, imagine you're a new employee, no one knows you're supposed to have the font. Then the person sends an email to someone or a little draft or something and it's the wrong font and it goes, "Hey, you have the wrong font. Why are you sending this?" "I didn't know I had the wrong font." So, it becomes this whole big disaster and I think we want to avoid that, especially if a person's first starting, it's really important.
Megan Quick:
Yeah. That first week sticks with you like nothing else. I can also speak from experience on that. Okay, this is more about just nuts and bolts question, but I do think a lot of folks wonder this or a lot of people who are in charge of creative agencies should keep this in mind, how often should machines be cycled out, like the lifecycle of...
George Dauterman:
So, I'd say Windows machines is three to four years, Macs are probably four to five. Macs in this last a little bit longer, just basically the way that Apple does operating systems. That's not necessarily true right now because of the Intel machines swap, but I think those machines are getting a little old now, so it's about time. Macs can last a really long time, like shockingly long time.
Megan Quick:
Oh, I know.
George Dauterman:
We all have that Mac at home that's kind of like limping along still, still boots up, still chimes. But I'd say that when things are really far out of warranty and the potential of it breaking is higher than the cost of it... potential downtime or the issue of it not functioning when you need it to gets higher than the cost of replacing it. So, if you follow a program of between three to five year fleet replacement and you're pretty consistent with it, you're going to get a pretty good result. You're not going to be caught out there.
What happens, I see a lot of companies is that they tend to wait too long and then they have a big fleet replacement in one shot. And we saw this quite a bit last year with the Windows 10 migration upgrade, and it just becomes a really expensive year for businesses and it's unpredictable. And the more you can dial in that cost or just have some predictability around that cost like, "Hey, I know I have 40 machines. I'm going to replace eight each year," that's a really great way of doing it. That's two a quarter. That's a manageable cost. It just requires the discipline and doing it every time.
Megan Quick:
Having someone manage it. Yeah.
George Dauterman:
And having some spares. That's the other piece that's really important is that you have a spare equipment that you can utilize as needed in case something breaks because you don't want people... Downtime has a much higher cost than you see on the surface of a replacement machine.
Megan Quick:
Absolutely. Yeah. I was about to say a lot of this is just to mitigate downtime or time where folks can't be doing their jobs. So, now we make the transition to something that could be... it could be happy or sad, but it's the offboarding experience, which is the mirror image of the onboarding, or the end of the road, if you will.
George Dauterman:
Yep.
Megan Quick:
But it's also just as important, if not a little... The stakes are high for the offboarding experience as well.
George Dauterman:
It becomes a much more critical cybersecurity and information security process. It's one that every questionnaire you'll ever see and/or insurance will ask how fast... It's not every form, but it's on forms, you'll see it ask, "What's the timeframe from when someone leaves the organization to when their machine and/or account is locked, and they're no longer able to access company files or systems?" So, a good offboarding experience, depending on what the situation is, if someone's being terminated for cause or it's sort of a surprise, obviously you want to be as human and empathetic as possible, work with the HR or leadership team to make sure that the person's not surprised at the lockout.
This is my own experience. Nothing's worse than locking someone out on a timetable, and then finding that they weren't told that they're going to be terminated. And they call you up and ask, "Hey, I'm locked out of my system. Do you know what's going on?" And you're like... Now you're being forced to lie, which is not good.
Megan Quick:
Exactly. Above my pay grade.
George Dauterman:
Yeah, exactly. So, you don't want to be in that situation. So I think what makes a good offboard experience is clarity of the situation for all the parties involved. And if it is a sort of a surprise or a sudden termination, that you do it, when you do execute that, you're telling people, the right people and as the timing is correct. It's really important. Other thing about a good offboarding honestly is documenting the offboarding just as rigorously as you would to onboarding.
Megan Quick:
I think that's a really great thing to say because sometimes when things end, people aren't... I feel like they forget that that's part of the process and just as vital as when you're onboarding someone as well.
George Dauterman:
Yeah. There's so many plays. And I think one of the other challenges is that when you're onboarding someone, you tend to onboard people with a fixed set of tools, and then it may grow over time. As they start working in the organization, they may add sort of a creep of permissions and scope of applications. So, when someone leaves your organization, you have a bit more of a challenge because you have to kind of backtrack that scope to make sure you didn't miss anything. And this is where the whole idea of the shadow IT, which is a different concept of the idea that people working on their own without having the company's knowledge and putting data, especially in this sort of world of AI where we don't necessarily know what people are logging into or with the user permission. So, we really want to make sure that we control the tooling and make sure that they don't have access... when they no longer work with the organization, that the access is revoked fully.
Megan Quick:
I guess that leads to this next question, which is... I was going to ask, what are the main risks associated with a bad offboarding or an incomplete offboarding? And you just kind of touched on it as far as-
George Dauterman:
Oh yeah. This is probably one of the biggest single... It has a lot of more knock-on implications than you would look on first blush. If you look at security research, machine accounts that are no longer attached to a person, no longer active, sort of like fallow unsecured accounts have a higher likelihood of being breached because there's no one noticing that there was a condition. So, let's say I offboard a person two weeks ago, and now that someone says, "Oh, leave that account running. We may need to log in as that person, but we're not doing it very often." Three, six months later, that machine, that account gets used as part of a compromise because no one's really watching it, and now they're using that credential to run around through the system.
Megan Quick:
Is that common?
George Dauterman:
It's more common than you would think. It's actually these people... I feel like I spend a lot of time explaining this to folks or they want to... because you really want to make sure that all accounts that are tied to humans are actually tied to a human that's doing login. And then service accounts are isolated into service accounts, and they're monitored a specific way. Another thing that happens to incomplete offboardings is that if we don't know all the applications they had access to, you might have it where they're three quarters offboarded, but they still have access to a critical system. You see this a lot, I think, in... Or I've seen it a lot is accounting systems where people leave, "Oh, we might need to log in and see how he or she did it," and their reviews and the special reports, and so they'll stick around for way too long. So, it's a really big thing.
Megan Quick:
I know we've had folks who were not concerned about the person they were offboarding necessarily, and then maybe they should have been more concerned.
George Dauterman:
Yeah.
Megan Quick:
I know that's a rare case as well, but I want to hear-
George Dauterman:
It's rare, but it happens and we've seen it firsthand where we were instructed not to offboard someone fully by some leadership and a client, "It's fine, we're friends, this, that, and the other thing." And once again, we never knew who was the person who left the company that sort of went in and kind of wreaked havoc inside a system, particularly as a mail server. This was a couple of years ago, but it was very disruptive for the company because we had to do a crash mail migration, and then they had to do a very complex data recovery of the mailboxes. And reality is you really want, when a person's gone, to lock them out of the system for both your safety and their safety.
Megan Quick:
That person.
George Dauterman:
You don't want any doubt in your mind that they are in there doing their thing or not doing their thing. So, the more you control of this you have, the better outcome. Also, you'll feel a sense of certainty that we're doing it. And I know we use a lot of tools to ensure that this happens because this is one of the areas that I think that many people fail to do well.
Megan Quick:
Yeah. I think, again, being on enough calls with you where we chatted with people and we got a snapshot of where they were IT-wise, we would often ask about the onboardings and off-boardings, and especially younger companies or smaller companies, they're like, "Oh, we don't have anything written about that. We do X, Y, Z." No judgment, the business is running faster than you are sometimes, but it's good when you have a moment to actually put these policies and procedures, documentation, put all that in place so you have a process.
George Dauterman:
I'd argue that this is probably the first piece of documentation you should develop in any company from an IT perspective, more so than any kind of use policy or mode access or passwords because this is really where rubber meets the road and the dangers, the risk is very high. And there's a lot of little pieces and nuance to it, but I think if you had to pick, this is the one area that I would spend time on, any company.
Megan Quick:
And then if... I feel like that's... Maybe you've already answered the first question of this number one, create documentation around this. I'm going to end on: what are the three things you would tell a small creative agency? "Hey, make sure you do these three things to get started with complete offboardings."
George Dauterman:
So, the first and most important thing, create said documentation for the person's onboarding and offboarding with definite steps and definite roles and responsibilities. HR person does this, the office manager does this, the IT team does this. Very clear, very defined with no ambiguity because this area of ambiguity causes you a lot of pain. Second thing I would do after creating a checklist is I would review what inventory I have. I want to make sure that if you don't know what you don't have, you can't secure it, nor can you manage it, control it. This goes deeper into something more like it could be something with insurance, it could be something with data information, it could be anything. So, sort of like work on your inventory and sort of keep it together.
And last thing I think just as important is work out the timing internally from when you hire people. So, I think what happens is a lot of people don't communicate, even in small companies, when they hire people and that's a really dangerous... or when they fire people. And this is really critical... Not to bring it full circle, but this is really critical with freelancers and contract workers, because sometimes contract workers just peter out the contract. And you stop working with them as they finish, but it's not really 100% finished, but we've got to keep them access still on. We're not sure yet, and they can go for months with access to your systems and no one's really monitoring it. And then you have extra licensing, you have extra costs, you have all these things. So, really tighten that up, and then think about the documentation, but really define the separation between the contract workers and the full-time employees and the communication list. So, it's a lot of upfront work, but you'll get the benefit of it pretty quickly.
Megan Quick:
Yeah. And I think for the conscientious CEOs out there, you'll get a better night's sleep knowing that this stuff is done.
George Dauterman:
Yeah. In the war for really good talent and people we want to work with, this is an area that... Oh, not to add another fourth thing, but have some clarity of how people can log in and get access to the tools. A lot at times, we'll get a lot of phone calls and a lot of trouble tickets of like, "I don't know how to get onto my," insert system. So, I think having a little bit of written documentation for the employee or new contract worker go a really long way to making people feel really comfortable and more productive.
Megan Quick:
I also love what you said about... You were talking about the war for the talent and people you want to work with. I think there is... All of this kind of boils down to showing a lot of mutual respect from the company to the employee, from the company, to the contractor. People go back to places where it's easy to work. Not necessarily like the projects are easy, but we're getting the work done. There are processes in place.
George Dauterman:
100%. And your next customer, your next client, your next project may come from someone that was a contract worker here or a former employee. I can tell you, we've worked a lot of over the years with people who used to work here at Valiant or who worked at other customers of ours, most businesses run on referrals, and this is a really strong place to make a good impression from the start to finish.
Megan Quick:
I love that. That is such a perfect way to put a button on this. Well, thank you so much for chatting, George. I know you were excited about this topic, again, because it's one of the first things you talked to me about my onboarding.
George Dauterman:
We want to go back to the well on this one a couple of times because this is a really important one, and get some real meat and potatoes on it.
Megan Quick:
Yeah. And I love it because there's a simple philosophy to it, but it's not an easy thing to do. And I think you're right, I think there's so many more areas we could look at with this as well. Well, thank you so much for joining me, George. And I'm so excited for our next episode. And listeners, if you have any questions or points of clarification, please feel free to comment or send us an email. We would love to chat or you can go to thevaliantway.com and you can write us a note. All right, George, it was so great chatting with you, and have a good rest of your day.
George Dauterman:
Thanks, Megan. You too. Bye now.
Megan Quick:
Bye. Thank you so much for listening to The Creative Stack. If you enjoyed the episode, please rate, review, and subscribe to us wherever you get your podcasts. The Creative Stack is created by Valiant Technology, a managed IT service provider based in New York that specializes in providing creative agencies and PR firms with the technology they need to achieve their goals. Please visit us at thevaliantway.com to learn more about our services. I'll see you next time.
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Apr 8, 2026