What "Veteran-Owned" Actually Means Day to Day at Cleartech Group

“Veteran-owned” shows up on a lot of company websites as a badge. At Cleartech Group, it shows up somewhere else instead: in Tuesday morning ticket reviews. In how the team grants and revokes access. In why a client’s hardware never quietly ages past end-of-support without anyone noticing. It’s not a story we tell. It’s a handful of specific habits we use every day.

Founder Tony Fields got his start with computers in the 1980s. He learned at home, years before it became a career. That early interest eventually led him into the U.S. Air Force as a Computer Operator, where he supported global network operations. From there, he administered access across a 500-user network and kept mainframe systems running for a defense weather program. After the military, he moved from network administrator to IT project leader. Eventually, he took the leap and started his own MSP, growing it from a spare-room startup into the team that runs Cleartech Group today.

When a new employee joins a client’s team, or someone leaves, nobody handles access informally or gets to it eventually. Instead, the team logs it, verifies it, and closes it out on a specific timeline. That standard isn’t a cybersecurity trend Cleartech adopted recently. In fact, it’s a habit Tony brought with him from his time in the Air Force, long before “access management” was an industry buzzword.

Clients don’t find out their server is three years past end-of-support, because nobody was watching. Instead, the team tracks hardware lifecycle, warranty status, and upgrade timing as a matter of course. That’s the same instinct behind maintaining accountability for a fleet of deployable equipment, rather than waiting for something to fail first.

Cleartech’s standard for “done” means the team logs, tracks, and confirms every service request resolved to client satisfaction. It’s not a quick reply that leaves the underlying problem open. That standard traces back to a specific job requirement Tony held years ago: log and track service requests through to resolution, not just field the call.

The team watches systems for early warning signs before they become outages. That way, clients don’t have to notice something’s wrong first. It’s a posture, not a tool, and the same one Tony’s Air Force role required: keep critical systems running proactively rather than reactively.