What should the first 90 days with a new MSP look like?

The first 90 days reveal whether you hired a system or just a new phone number. A professional onboarding starts with documentation: every device, license, credential, and vendor relationship mapped — usually surfacing surprises the previous provider never wrote down. In parallel, monitoring and security tooling deploys to every machine, giving the new provider actual visibility.

The middle stretch is remediation: the accumulated deferred maintenance — unpatched systems, unverified backups, security gaps, the printer nobody ever fixed properly — gets worked through as a project list with priorities you can see. Expect the ticket volume to be HIGHER than normal in these months; that's the backlog draining, not the new provider failing.

By day 90 you should have: current documentation you own, verified backups with a test-restore on record, a security baseline (MFA, endpoint protection, email security), and a noticeable decline in the recurring problems that defined the old relationship. Ask for a 90-day review meeting where the provider shows exactly this.