OnboardIQ is built by IT Custom Solution, a New York government contractor that runs five other products across the customer journey. This page is the story of how OnboardIQ became one of them, written by the person who started ITC.
Lu Fagbure runs IT Custom Solution from a small office in Midtown Manhattan, where ITC has held a federal facility clearance and delivered to civilian and defense agencies since 2018. Before ITC, Lu spent twelve years inside two larger systems integrators, running cleared onboarding for hundreds of engineers across four contract types. He knows the eleven days because he used to lose them in a row.
ITC builds software the way Lu built contract delivery: opinionated, audited, and shipped on a schedule a contracting officer can verify. He writes the announcement emails, signs the offer letters, and is the named CSM on every GovCon-tier account until that stops being a thing one person can do.
Dear reader,
In the first year ITC was a real company, we won an award on a contract I am still proud of, and then almost lost it because we could not onboard the four engineers we needed for it in time. The work was technical. The blocker was paper. I-9s in a Drive folder. An NDA emailed to the wrong personal address. A subcontractor packet that sat for nine days because nobody knew the prime's security officer was on vacation. We hit Day 1 with three of the four engineers, and the fourth showed up on Day 8.
That contract closed. We were lucky. We were also embarrassed.
Over the next four years, I watched the same problem repeat in different shapes. A cleared engineer onboarded onto a system that did not track her reinvestigation, and we missed it by a month. A 1099 contractor onboarded through a workflow designed for W-2 employees, and we discovered at tax time that the State of California had been waiting for a 1099-NEC since March. A DCAA reviewer asked for the chain of custody on a signed I-9 from 2021, and the file was on a former HR coordinator's personal Drive.
We tried the obvious things. We bought a generic HRIS. It is excellent at being a generic HRIS. It could not branch a contractor flow without an integration we did not have time to build. We tried the enterprise platform that the prime on one of our contracts uses. It quoted six figures and twelve weeks of implementation, which we did not have. We tried writing it ourselves in a spreadsheet with custom Slack bots, which is approximately what every small contractor I know has done at least once.
OnboardIQ is the product I would have wanted to buy in year one. It is built around the eleven days, not around payroll. It treats clearance as the architecture, not as a flag. It bills you for the artifact you actually bought, which is a person ready to do the work. The audit trail is the product, because the audit trail is what saves you three years from now when the contracting officer who wasn't in the room asks the question.
We use it on every ITC contract. We use it on every new ITC hire. The first paying customer outside the building is going to be a small federal contractor we already know, and the second is going to be a healthcare firm running a real I-9 program at fifty employees. After that, we will see.
Sincerely,
IT Custom Solution LLC is the parent company. ITC is a New York 8(a)-eligible small business that delivers software, security, and program management to federal and regulated commercial customers. We hold a Secret facility clearance, we are CMMC Level 2 in audit, and we are a registered SAM.gov vendor in good standing.
We do contract delivery. We also do software, because the contract delivery taught us what was missing. OnboardIQ is one of six products in the suite. Each one came from the same place: an internal pain we got tired of running through a spreadsheet.
Six products, one customer journey. Single ITC account signs you into all of them. OnboardIQ is stop two: onboard the team that will deliver the work you won in GovBid.
The ITC office is two floors of a building at the corner of Lexington and 43rd, ten minutes from Grand Central. There is a SCIF on the second floor, a kitchen with too many kinds of tea, and a printer that jams in the same way once a week. Most of the software ITC ships was written in that room, by people who use it on the contracts they are also delivering. We mention the room because the product is shaped by it.
If you would like to see it, we run an open house on the first Friday of each month for customers and prospective customers who can make it to New York. Email us; we will tell you what to bring.
Five open roles across the ITC suite. OnboardIQ is hiring two of them. Govcon-cleared candidates are encouraged; we sponsor and we will work with your current sponsor on a clearance crossover.
If the parentage story landed and you want to try the product, the trial is fourteen days and includes up to five real onboardings. If you would rather talk to Lu or another ITC principal first, that is also fine. The address is below.