Director of IT Operations, WebGuy Internet, Salt Lake City, UT
Mitchell Sanborn
I run IT for a Salt Lake–area MSP: network architecture, endpoint management, security. But I've watched good infrastructure fail because nobody showed people how to use it, so training isn't an afterthought here. It's half the job.
- Apple Certified Support Professional
- Jamf Certified Associate
About
I'm Mitch Sanborn, Director of IT Operations at WebGuy Internet, with nearly 10 years in IT. WebGuy is a Salt Lake–area MSP serving about 40 clients across healthcare, education, and hospitality. I lead a small team supporting roughly 1,000 users and 1,200 devices: network architecture, endpoint management, compliance programs. But I spend just as much time on the part that doesn't show up in an org chart: making sure the people using the systems actually know how to run them.
I'm self-taught. No degree, just a decade of climbing from help desk to director, one job at a time. (Career history below, if you want the play-by-play.)
Outside of work I'm a husband, a dad to a two-year-old, a home cook, and someone whose passion for tech has let their homelab get ridiculously complicated. Family life has made me good at the same thing I do at work: explaining complex ideas simply to people who don't live in IT.
Rules I live by
IT should feel personal
Users deserve support that listens and adapts to how they work, not just how the system was designed.
Documentation is the deliverable
Clear, contextual docs keep systems resilient and make handoffs painless for whoever comes next.
Simple beats clever
A stable, well-supported solution beats something complex that only one person can maintain.
Test first, then deploy
The homelab exists to break things safely before they hit production. It has saved me from more than a few disasters.
Career
The part that doesn't fit in the stats: training the team and our clients well enough that none of it depends on me being in the room.
Network segmentation contained 5 security incidents; backups restored systems within 3 hours. Led WebGuy to Apple Consultant status.
Supported 1,800 employees, onboarding 10–30 new hires a month.
Held the company record for most support chats handled in a single 10-hour shift: 215.
Experience
Selected work
These didn't fit on a resume line. They say more about how I actually work than the bullet points do.
For three hotel front desks
Per-user login for every front-desk employee
Everyone at the front desk signed in as the same user, so nobody could say who had touched guest card data. Two of us are moving all three hotels to individual Intune logins before the busy season starts.
For every client we protect
Wazuh SIEM, deployed twice
The same Wazuh SIEM protecting my clients watches my own Proxmox network first, now using AI to draft tuned alert rules from the noise. Nothing gets tested on someone else.
For my team's time
PowerShell security audit toolkit
A PowerShell toolkit that cross-references M365, Atera, Huntress, and Active Directory in one pass. The audit that used to take all day now takes under an hour.
For a local brewery's customers
Brewery PCI network design
Redesigned a client's network (POS isolation, guest Wi-Fi, camera VLANs, site-to-site VPN) and passed a third-party PCI audit on the result.
For every new hire
Onboarding without the ticket queue
Replaced ticket-driven onboarding with real communication: consistent device setup, smoother transitions, and far less back-and-forth with HR.
Also building
For anyone whose data I touch
A local AI stack with a data-governance policy
Nothing that belongs to a client ever leaves my hands for someone else's AI. Local inference on a Mac Studio, routed through a LiteLLM gateway with virtual keys enforcing the rule.
For the clients who never see this
Self-hosted infrastructure
If something's going to break, it breaks here first. A Proxmox cluster running 30+ VMs across three compute nodes, plus a dedicated backup server.
Stack
The toolbox
What I reach for day to day, patched in by function rather than vendor.
Hover (or tap) a port for what's actually plugged in.
Contact
Let's talk about your environment
If you're hiring for a Director of IT, IT Manager, or technical services role, or just want a second opinion on something, feel free to get in touch.
I color-code my patch cables. It's equal parts aesthetic and sanity.