About Gavilan Consulting
We are a computer, network and IT services company. We work on-site across California's Central Valley and provide remote support anywhere in the entire United States — for businesses that need a whole IT department, and for people who need one machine fixed properly.
Who We Are
An IT Company, Not A Call Center
The short version: we fix, build and look after the computers and networks that businesses and households depend on. There is no product being sold underneath that.
Most companies do not want an IT department. They want the printer to work, the email to arrive, the file to open, and the invoice to go out on Friday. Everything we do exists to make that ordinary and boring, and to make the day it stops being ordinary as short as possible.
The work falls into four areas, and only four. If you are trying to work out which one your problem belongs in, the honest answer is that it does not matter — describe the symptom and we will place it.
- Managed IT Services — Your whole IT department for a flat monthly fee — monitoring, maintenance, helpdesk and on-site visits, all included.
- Computer Repair & Tech Support — Repairs, upgrades, virus and malware removal, new machine setup, and patient help for the people using them.
- Networks, Servers & Cloud — Wired and wireless networks, servers, firewalls, VPN, Microsoft 365 and email — designed, installed and looked after.
- Data Recovery, Backup & Forensics — Encrypted on-site and off-site backup, disaster recovery planning, data recovery, and digital forensic examination.
We look after the whole environment rather than one slice of it: servers, desktop PCs, Macs, laptops, phones and tablets, the network they all sit on, and the accounts and email that tie them together. A company that only supports the desktops leaves you holding the parts nobody covers, and those parts are usually the ones that take the business down.
Business and residential are both normal here. An office with a server and a room full of workstations and a household with one laptop are different jobs, but they are not different standards of work.
The name is older than this website. Gavilan Consulting is being restarted under the same name and the same principles it always worked under, with decades of experience behind the way problems get diagnosed. What is new is the site you are reading, not the approach it describes.
How We Work
What Working With Us Actually Looks Like
No sales process, no discovery call that is really a pitch. This is the order things happen in, from the first phone call to the write-up afterwards.
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The First Conversation Is Free
Call or write and describe the problem in whatever words you have. "It has been slow since Tuesday" is a perfectly good starting point. We ask questions until the picture is clear, and that initial consultation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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We Look Before We Quote
For anything ongoing we assess what you already have first: how many machines, how they are connected, what the server is doing, whether a backup exists, and what breaks most often. A flat monthly agreement is quoted per client after that assessment, because a small single-office practice and a business running several locations are not the same job and should not carry the same number.
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Remote First, Because It Is Faster For You
Most problems are solved in a remote session in minutes, rather than after somebody drives across the Valley. You can watch what we do on your own screen. For clients on an agreement, continuous monitoring of the servers and network equipment often surfaces the problem before anyone in the office has noticed it.
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On Site When The Problem Is Physical
Some things cannot be done down a wire: pulling cable, mounting an access point where the signal actually reaches, swapping a failed power supply, or opening up the machines and cleaning the dust out so they stop overheating and shutting down at four in the afternoon. On-site visits are scheduled across the Central Valley.
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Ongoing Or One-Off — Both Are Normal
An agreement is a flat monthly fee covering monitoring, maintenance, helpdesk and on-site visits, customized to your environment. If you do not want an agreement, that is genuinely fine: bring us one broken machine, one migration or one recovery, and we will do that job and hand it back.
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You Get Told What Happened
At the end you get a plain explanation of what was wrong, what was changed, and what to watch for. Not a ticket number and a status of "resolved". If a decision is coming that will cost money later, you hear about it while there is still time to plan for it.
What We Believe
What You Can Expect From Us
Anyone can promise good service. These are the specific things we would want to be judged on, written plainly enough that you can hold us to them.
We Fix The Cause, Not The Symptom
Restarting a machine clears a symptom. It tells you nothing about why the machine needed restarting. If a computer locks up every Tuesday afternoon, we want to know what runs on Tuesday afternoons. A repair that leaves the cause in place is a repair you pay for twice, and the second time is always more expensive than the first.
We Will Tell You When It Is Not Worth Repairing
Sometimes the part costs more than the machine is worth, or the repair buys you a few more months on hardware that is already failing in several other places. You will hear that, with the numbers, even though the profitable answer would be to quote the repair. Getting told the truth once is what makes the next call to us worth making.
We Explain It In Language You Can Act On
Jargon is often used to end a conversation rather than to have one. You should finish every call knowing what happened and what your options were, in ordinary words. If an explanation leaves you nodding without understanding, it was a bad explanation, and that is our problem to fix, not yours.
You Own Your Own Systems
Your domain, your accounts, your licenses and your backups belong to you and stay registered in your name, and you get the documentation that goes with them. An IT company that keeps the keys has made itself impossible to leave, which is a business model, not a service. We would rather you stay because the work is good.
We Do The Boring Maintenance
Scheduled preventative maintenance is unglamorous and it is most of what keeps a network upright: updates applied on purpose instead of at random, drives watched for the warning signs that come before a failure, dust cleaned out of machines that run hot and shut themselves down, and backups treated as something to be verified rather than assumed. A backup nobody has ever restored from is a hope, not a backup.
We Write It Down
What is plugged into what, which machine does which job, where the backup goes, and why a setting was changed. Documentation is what turns an outage from an investigation into a fix, and it is what lets any competent technician pick your network up later — including one who is not us.
Who We Work For
From One Home Computer To A Whole Office Network
There is no minimum size and no minimum job. These are the shapes the work usually takes.
Homes And Families
A laptop that has become unusably slow, a machine full of pop-ups and warnings, a new computer that needs everything moved onto it, a printer that stopped talking to the house, photographs on a drive that will no longer open. Residential work is genuinely welcome, and it comes with patient help for the person using the machine rather than a lecture. Start with computer repair and tech support.
Small Offices With No IT Person
A handful of computers, a shared printer, email in the cloud, and one person who ended up as the unofficial technician because they were the least afraid of it. That arrangement works right up until the morning it does not, and that person is on vacation. It can be handled call-by-call, or handed over entirely under a flat monthly managed IT agreement so that nobody in the office has to own it anymore.
Businesses With Servers And Staff
Once there is a server, a firewall, staff working from more than one place and a phone system that runs over the same wires, the failures stop being individual and start being everybody at once. This is where design matters: see networks, servers and cloud for how wired and wireless networks, VPN access, Microsoft 365 and email get built to survive a bad day.
Anyone Facing A Bad Day With Their Data
A drive that stopped mounting, a folder that was deleted and emptied, a ransomware note, or a legal matter that needs the contents of a machine examined properly and documented. That is data recovery, backup and forensics, and it is also where encrypted on-site and off-site backup and a written disaster recovery plan stop this being a bad day at all.
Not sure which of these you are? Call and describe it — sorting that out is our job, not yours. Common questions are answered on the questions and answers page.
The Name
A Gavilán Is A Hawk
Gavilán is Spanish for hawk, which in the Central Valley is not an exotic reference — it is the bird sitting on the fence post at the edge of an orchard, watching a field it is not standing in.
The mark at the top of this page, and again at the bottom of it, is that hawk with its wings spread above a mountain peak — and the peak is drawn at the same angle that runs through the rest of the site. It was chosen because it describes the job better than a picture of a computer would. A hawk works by holding a position above the ground and noticing the one thing that has changed. That is very close to what monitoring a network is: staying above it, and catching the single thing out of place before it becomes the reason nobody can work on Monday.
The mark is drawn rather than photographed, which is why it looks the same on the dark bar at the top of this page as it does on the lighter page below it, and why it stays sharp on a phone. The peak takes the color of whatever surrounds it. The hawk stays red wherever it appears.
A name is worth exactly as much as the work behind it. This one is not new, the way of working under it is not new, and neither is being asked to explain a bill or a decision in plain English. The website is the only part of this that is.
Where We Work
On-Site In The Central Valley, Remote Nationwide
Two halves, and they are always stated together, because each one on its own would give you the wrong picture of what we can do for you.
On-site work runs the length of the Valley. Sacramento and Stockton in the north, down through Modesto, Merced and Madera, into Fresno and Clovis in the middle, and on through Hanford, Visalia and Tulare to Bakersfield in the south. If your town sits between two of those, ask — the Central Valley service areas page lists each city and what tends to be different about the work there.
Everything that does not require somebody physically standing next to the machine can be done remotely, for a client anywhere in the country. That covers most support calls, most server and Microsoft 365 administration, most virus and malware removal, and the ongoing monitoring and maintenance that comes with an agreement. Distance changes the response, not the standard.
Where To Next
Three Useful Places To Go From Here
All IT Services
The four service lines in detail — what each one covers, what it is for, and which one your problem probably belongs in.
See All ServicesCentral Valley Service Areas
Every city we cover on site, from Sacramento to Bakersfield, plus how remote support works for everyone outside that.
Check Your CityContact Gavilan Consulting
Send the details of what is going wrong, or call and describe it. The first conversation is free and there is no obligation after it.
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