Who we are
Twenty-nine years of quietly keeping things running.
Cardinl is a small managed IT firm with one job: making sure the technology your organization depends on doesn't get in the way of the work you're actually trying to do.
We've been doing this work since the dial-up era, through the rise of the cloud, and into whatever this current era of IT turns out to be called.
What started in 1997 as PC repair and home networking out of a small office has grown into a full-service IT practice — but the core hasn't changed. The person you call is the person who does the work. The advice you get is the advice you'd hear from a friend who happens to be in the room. The systems we build are the systems we'd want running our own business.
Most of our clients are small businesses and nonprofits — the kind of organizations that are too big to fly without IT, but too small to justify a full-time team. That gap is where we live.
A short history
How we got here.
July 1997
Founded as aawest.net
Started doing web work, personal computer repair, and home networking. The first clients were neighbors, friends, and a handful of small businesses down the street.
Early 2000s
Business-level support
Windows Server and workstation work became the bulk of the practice as small businesses started outgrowing the consumer-grade setups they'd been running on.
2006
Dual-platform from the inside out
Brought Apple into the shop to learn the Mac ecosystem properly. It made us a better Windows shop too — we stopped treating cross-platform problems as edge cases.
2010s
Nonprofit IT focus develops
Began partnering with nonprofit organizations who needed real IT support on lean budgets. That client base still anchors a lot of the work today.
2022
Cardinl LLC
Formal business formation and rebrand. New name and structure, same hands behind it, almost three decades of accumulated practice underneath.
What we believe
Four things that guide the work.
Prevention pays for itself
Every hour spent on patching, monitoring, and documentation is an hour you don't spend in a crisis. The math is boring and it's still true.
Plain language, always
If we can't explain it without jargon, we don't understand it well enough yet. You should never feel managed by your IT provider.
Platform-neutral on purpose
Windows, Mac, Linux, cloud, mobile — we work in all of them because that's what your team actually uses. No quiet preference for the platform we know best.
Show our work
Every change we make is documented, every quarter we tell you what we changed and why, and every system we build comes with the runbook to maintain it.
"When it's done right, you barely notice us. That's the point."
Cardinl operating principleLet's talk
If any of that resonates, we should probably talk.
A free 45-minute assessment. We'll listen first, send a written summary either way, and only pitch you if we think we can actually help.
Request an assessment →