The Craftwork Group
About The Craftwork Group

Four things we
don't compromise on.

Transparency, accountability, craftsmanship, and long-term thinking. Not aspirations — how we run every engagement.

Engineers
not a help desk
SMB
focused exclusively
Pacific NW
rooted & present
  • Pacific Northwest, independently owned — no private equity, no growth-at-any-cost agenda
  • Engineers who came up through operations, not sales
  • Vendor-agnostic — we recommend what fits, not what pays commissions
  • Month-to-month after 90-day baseline — no lock-in by contract
  • We run what we recommend — our own infrastructure is our test environment
  • Runbooks delivered as part of every engagement, not locked in our heads
"We built TCG because we kept seeing the same pattern: great technology decisions undermined by the wrong hands operating them. We decided to be the right hands."

The Craftwork Group was founded in 2025 — but the engineers who built it had been working together for years before the name was on the door. TCG came together from an existing team, existing client relationships, and a set of operating standards already tested and proven in production environments across the Pacific Northwest. The founders bring over 70 years of combined field experience in IT infrastructure, managed services, and enterprise operations. Add the full team bench and that number reaches 101+. We didn't start from scratch. We started from proven.

We're small by design. Not because we can't grow, but because the kind of support we offer doesn't scale through ticket queues and tiered escalations. Every client relationship has a named engineer who knows their environment, not a rotating cast of people reading from notes. That's a conscious business decision, and it's the reason our clients stay.

We work across industries — manufacturing, professional services, healthcare-adjacent businesses, and organizations running AI or data workloads on-premises. What they share is a need for IT that runs reliably and someone who gives a straight answer when something breaks. That's what we're here for.

How We Work

Four things we don't compromise on

// 01
Own the problem
When something in your environment breaks, it's our problem to solve — not a ticket to close. We don't declare victory when the symptom disappears. We track it to root cause, document what happened, and fix the underlying condition. If we don't know why something failed, that's unfinished work.
// 02
Say what's true
We'll tell you when a technology isn't right for your use case, even if we could implement it. We'll tell you when the scope you've described won't get the outcome you want. We'd rather have a difficult conversation upfront than a failed project later. Our clients appreciate this — eventually, sometimes immediately.
// 03
Build to last
We design infrastructure for the next five years, not the next sprint. That means documentation that survives personnel changes, configurations that can be reasoned about at 2am, and runbooks that your team can actually execute without calling us. Dependency on us is a design failure. We build for your independence.
// 04
Operational humility
We're honest with ourselves and our clients about where things actually stand. If a migration is going to take longer than expected, you hear it from us before it shows up as a problem. If an approach isn't working, we say so and change course. Confidence without humility is how environments fail quietly — we'd rather say the hard thing early.
The Team

Engineers first, everything else second

// Principal Engineer & Founder
Ryan Collier

Ryan started in break-fix in the late 1990s and was running Linux server environments before cloud was an option, building through the full arc of IT: bare metal to virtual, on-prem to hybrid, traditional managed services to AI inference infrastructure. That's not a career highlight — it's the operating context for every recommendation he makes.

His background spans network engineering, Linux systems administration, Windows enterprise environments, identity and access management, storage engineering, and more recently, on-premises AI infrastructure deployment. He doesn't subspecialize into a corner — he holds the full stack, because that's what production environments actually require.

He started The Craftwork Group because he kept watching clients get underserved by firms that treated IT as a product category rather than an operational discipline. TCG is the response to that pattern: a firm where the person responsible for your infrastructure is the same person who picks up the phone.

// The broader team

TCG is built around a core of senior engineers and a carefully selected network of specialists — security, networking, application infrastructure, cloud — who engage on specific workloads as needed. We don't staff generalists to fill a bench. Every person who touches your environment has a specific reason to be there, and Ryan remains the continuity point across all of it.

Why It Matters

What's different about working with us

Not claims. Structural differences in how we engage — the kind that show up when something goes sideways at 11pm.

Named engineer, not a queue
You know who's responsible for your environment before something breaks. Not a ticket number, not an escalation path — a person. That accountability changes how we approach every decision about your infrastructure. When a project demands specialist depth, we engage vetted engineers from our network — the same accountability model applies to everyone we bring into your environment.
Runbooks as deliverables
Every engagement produces documentation your team can actually execute. We don't build environments that require us to operate them. The goal is infrastructure you understand, not infrastructure that keeps you dependent on us.
No vendor commissions
We don't get paid when you buy a product. We recommend tools we've run, calibrated to your environment and budget — not to a margin target. When we say a tool is right for you, it's because we believe it, not because it pays better than the alternative.
Month-to-month after 90 days
Our managed services move to month-to-month after a 90-day baseline period. We stay because you want us to, not because you're contractually obligated. That keeps us honest and keeps you in control of the relationship.

Work with people who give a damn.

If you're tired of IT that treats your environment as a ticket queue — or an upsell opportunity — let's have a conversation. No pitch. Just a straight answer on whether and how we can help.

Get In Touch

Let's talk about your environment

Tell us what you're running and what's not working. We'll respond with a straight answer — not a sales call.

Location
21019 66th Ave. S
Kent, WA 98032
Hours
Monday–Friday, 8am–6pm PT
After-hours support available for active clients — we pick up.