From there the work got more complex. By 2005 I was handling commercial hardware — servers and SAN systems for enterprise clients in Kentucky. In 2008 I moved into remote application support in Upstate New York, running help desk operations across multiple business clients simultaneously. In 2010, business internet infrastructure. Each role added a layer: more systems, more scale, more understanding of how businesses actually depend on technology to function.
In 2012, I moved to Houston to join a managed services provider. I was handed responsibility for a 200-seat client almost from day one. Over the next four years I worked through nearly every function the business had: primary onsite technician, evening maintenance, first call for after-hours emergencies, client onboarding, initial environment assessments, and eventually working alongside engineering and sales to design custom solutions for new clients. By 2015 I was regularly putting in 70-hour weeks.
The hours I could live with. What I couldn’t live with was the growing gap between how I believed client relationships should be handled and how they were actually being handled. In 2016 I encountered a situation that made staying impossible. I left the same week.
I’ve never questioned that decision.
My first clients were business owners who had worked with me at my former employer and chose to follow me when I left. The rest came through in-person networking in the Houston business community. Nobody found me through a Google ad. They found me because someone they trusted said my name.
For the first several years on my own, I worked with whoever called — law firms, medical practices, construction companies, manufacturers, retailers, nonprofits. I’ve seen the full range of what can go wrong. I’ve been called in after a business email compromise attack that cost a Houston business $60,000 in wire fraud. I’ve watched firms lose billable hours, client trust, and sleep over IT problems that were entirely preventable.
Then the rules changed.
Between 2023 and 2026, the compliance environment for Texas professional services firms changed more than it had in the previous twenty years combined. The FTC Safeguards Rule expanded and started carrying real penalties. SEC Reg S-P amendments arrived with a smaller-entity deadline of June 3, 2026. Texas passed SB 2610, creating an affirmative safe harbor against punitive damages for firms with a qualifying cybersecurity program in place at the time of a breach. TRAIGA followed on January 1, 2026, adding AI governance obligations on top.
I watched the firms I worked with — particularly the law practices, CPAs, RIAs, and tax preparation shops — wake up to the fact that their IT vendor and their compliance program were now the same conversation. And I watched most of their existing IT vendors fail to understand what was being asked of them.
That’s the gap I built the current practice to close.
Today, Briggs IT Services is a compliance specialist serving Texas law firms, CPAs, RIAs, and tax preparation practices. We help our clients understand what their regulators actually expect, build the cybersecurity program that satisfies those expectations, operate it every day, document everything that happens, and translate the regulatory requirements into work that actually gets done. The cybersecurity tools — endpoint management, email security, MFA, backups, EDR — are the floor, not the ceiling. The value we add sits above them: a written program a managing partner can hand to an examiner, an auditor, or a plaintiff’s attorney, and have it hold up.
Briggs IT Services is intentionally a one-person operation. That’s not a gap — it’s the point. When you contact me, you reach me. Not a helpdesk queue. Not a tier-one technician reading from a script. Someone who already knows your systems, your team, your regulatory stack, and how your firm works. I work with Texas professional firms in the 10–50 employee range — too big to ignore IT and compliance, too lean to staff a full internal department against either. That’s exactly where I’m most useful.
If you’re a Texas law firm, CPA practice, RIA, or tax preparation firm that needs a partner who speaks your regulators’ language — and you’re tired of IT vendors who treat compliance as an afterthought — let’s have a conversation. The first one is free, and I’ll give you an honest picture of where you stand against your specific compliance stack, whether we work together or not.
— Jim Briggs, Founder | Briggs IT Services | The Woodlands, TX