When we are the wrong choice

Seven reasons to ring somebody else

If one of these is you, we are not the right call

Each one says where to go instead. Ruling yourself out here costs you two minutes; finding out after a survey costs both of us a fortnight.

1. You need someone at 3am

   Standard cover is Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm, with out-of-hours as an add-on and included on Advanced. That means one of us picking up a phone, not a shift handing over to another shift.

   If you need somebody watching a screen at four in the morning, you want a provider with a Network Operations Centre. Ask anyone quoting you 24/7 how many people are on that rota. If the answer is one, it is not 24/7.

2. You want the cheapest

   There are providers in Cardiff advertising from £12.50 per user. That is a real service, and for a settled office with everything already in Microsoft 365 it may be exactly right. Ours starts at £50 because site visits, backup and a named engineer are in the price rather than added when you need them.

   If price is the deciding factor rather than one of the factors, we will lose, and we should. Better you know that from the pricing page than after a survey.

3. You are over about fifty staff

   Five to fifty is where we work best. Past that you start needing things we would rather admit to not having yet: an account manager who is not also an engineer, cover that does not depend on one person being available, a desk with a night shift, and an escalation path with names in it.

   We are building toward it. If you need it in place on day one, larger firms in Cardiff and Bristol are better set up, and we will say so rather than take the contract and stretch.

4. You want CCTV from a security specialist

   The firms around Neath, Swansea and Bridgend holding NSI Gold or SSAIB accreditation do camera work to a standard we do not claim to match, and some insurers and licensing conditions require that accreditation specifically.

   What we do instead is run the network the cameras sit on, which is the half most installers hand back and hope for the best. One supplier accountable for both halves is us. Accreditation is not.

5. You are outside South Wales

   We cover Pembroke and Narberth in the west to Newport in the east, and Barry up to Brecon, with the real distance published for every town.

   Outside it we say no. Being twenty minutes away is the single most useful thing about us on the day something breaks, and it stops being true at three hours. Providers who cover the whole country are covering it from somewhere, and it is worth asking where.

6. You are three people and want a monthly plan

   We removed our minimum user count, because a three-person firm that knows what it wants should not be turned away by a number on a pricing card. But below about five people, ad-hoc support at £95 an hour often works out cheaper than any plan.

   We will run the sums and tell you if it does, and you can ring us when something breaks instead. Less revenue for us, less spend for you, and the right answer more often than the industry admits.

7. You want a supplier who does what they are told

   This is the one that costs us most. If we think a piece of work is a bad idea we will say so, once, plainly, with the reasoning. If you want it anyway we will do it, document that we advised against it, and get on with it without sulking.

   Some people want a supplier who quotes what was asked for and stays quiet. That is a legitimate preference and we are bad at it. If you want somebody to tell you the backup has not worked since March, we are a better fit than most.