Almost all IT advice comes from somebody who sells something. The cloud provider recommends the cloud. The hardware supplier recommends hardware. The company with a Microsoft partnership recommends Microsoft. It is not usually dishonesty — but it does mean the advice tends to arrive shaped like whatever the adviser happened to have in stock.
We do not sell products, hold manufacturer partnerships, or take commission from anybody. That leaves us free to tell you what we would actually do.
The first visit is free
Free within about thirty miles of Ashby, which covers most of Leicestershire, south Derbyshire and the surrounding area.
We will come out, look at what you have, listen to what is actually bothering you, and tell you what we would do about it and roughly what it would cost. You pay nothing until you have agreed to something.
Further afield we will still happily come — we will just agree the travel with you beforehand rather than surprise you with it.
After that, £45 an hour — the same as everything else
There is no consultancy rate.
Advice is charged at exactly the same £45 an hour as fixing a printer or rebuilding a network. We have never really understood why thinking about your problem should cost more than solving it, and we have never been able to explain the difference to a client in a way that sounded honest.
Bring us somebody else’s quote
If you have been quoted for something and it does not sit right, show it to us.
We will tell you whether the price is fair, whether it does what you actually need, and whether there is a simpler way to get the same result. We have no stake in the answer — we are not bidding for the work unless you ask us to.
Sometimes the quote turns out to be perfectly reasonable and we say so. That is a useful thing to know too, and it is worth an hour of anybody’s money to find out before committing to several thousand pounds of somebody else’s.
What people usually come to us for
- Office moves — the IT side of a relocation, from cabling design through to everyone being able to work on Monday morning
- Cloud decisions — whether Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, or staying broadly where you are makes most sense, and what the migration would actually involve
- Repair or replace — whether a machine, a server or a system is worth spending money on or has reached the end of its useful life
- Security reviews — an honest look at where you stand, which runs into our cyber security work if anything needs doing
- Second opinions — on a quote, a proposal, or advice you have been given elsewhere
- Project oversight — independent eyes on a larger piece of work, keeping suppliers honest and the timetable real
When the answer is to do nothing
Fairly often, the honest recommendation is that what you have is working, the problem is not worth the cost of solving, and the money would do more good somewhere else in the business.
We say that more than you might expect. It costs us the work in the short term, and it is most of the reason people ring us again.
The advice we are proudest of is usually the advice not to spend.
Getting started
Tell us roughly what you are trying to work out — a move, a migration, a quote you are unsure about, or simply a nagging feeling that your IT is not quite right. We will arrange a visit, and that first conversation costs you nothing.