The slow computer. The system that needs a workaround. The colleague everyone asks to fix it. Dillan of Microtech says these everyday irritations can cost more than we think.
When Dillan told me about the IT problems at one of his clients, Mani Life Peanut Butter, my first thought was that my own business is hardly a peanut butter factory! My second was that I knew exactly what he meant. My computer had been hanging while I tried to get on with work, and I had more or less accepted the wait as part of my day. I would turn it on, make a cup of tea, hit the space bar several times and move the mouse around until I could enter the passcode. Quite often, I had finished the first cup and made a second before I could actually start any work. Lovely for my tea consumption, less lovely for getting anything done. With Dillan’s help, I discovered its memory usage was at 100 per cent. Once we cleared some things out, it was noticeably better. One small fix, but it made me wonder how many other little delays I had stopped noticing.
It helps that Dillan is very easy to talk to. Microtech’s Managing Director is a lovely guy, a bit of a cheeky chappy, with plenty of charm and a mischievous glint in his eye. He is funny and good company, but get him talking about how a business works and you quickly realise how much he understands. He can see a solution in the little niggles you have been putting up with for months, as well as in the bigger problems that need a proper plan. What I particularly like is that you can have a laugh with him and still have an open, honest conversation about what needs doing. He takes his work seriously, cracks on with it and has an incredible team around him to get it done. For a business owner with enough on her plate already, that combination is quite an asset.
Dillan sees that habit of putting up with things across businesses of all sizes. The laptop that takes ages to start, the application that needs a workaround, the internet connection everyone knows will drop at the wrong moment: none feels urgent enough to call a meeting about. Yet each one takes time from people who have other work to do. As we talked about Mani Life, I began thinking about the systems we use every day, what we have learned to put up with, and what a growing business might gain if somebody looked at the whole picture.
“More often, it’s something far less dramatic,” he says of the problems his team encounters. “Businesses become accustomed to technology that is simply not good enough.”
When the workarounds become the way of working
At Mani Life Peanut Butter, nothing had gone spectacularly wrong. The 20-person manufacturer had managed its IT internally while it was smaller, but growth meant more time spent keeping systems going and less time focused on the product. Microtech moved the business to Microsoft 365 with security built in, automated device updates, continuous backups and monitoring for suspicious sign-ins. When Mani Life opened a factory in Mansfield, Microtech also designed a network for the office and factory floor that could be monitored and expanded. It is a good example of a business recognising that the setup which got it started was no longer the setup it needed.
Most of us will not be opening a factory, but the smaller versions of that problem are everywhere. A new employee starts and nobody is quite sure which accounts they need, who can grant access or whether the person who left six months ago still has it. A useful file lives on one person’s laptop. Two teams copy the same information into different systems because the applications do not talk to each other. It all works, in the loosest sense of the word, because someone keeps filling the gaps by hand.
“Ask Sarah, she knows how to fix it”
You may recognise a version of this in your own business. “You just have to restart it.” “Don’t use that Wi-Fi network.” “Ask Sarah, she knows how to get it working.” As Dillan puts it, “Employees have begun organising the way they work around the limitations of the company’s technology. It should be the other way around.”
Sarah, of course, might actually run operations or accounts. She is simply the person who happens to be good with computers. Every hour spent sorting a printer or resetting a password is an hour away from her proper job. And if nobody owns the bigger picture, who is checking the backups, security and what the business will need as it grows?
The cost can be surprisingly real. If 20 people each lose 15 minutes a day to slow systems or unnecessary admin, that amounts to five hours a day, or roughly 1,200 hours over a working year. At £20 to £30 an hour, that represents £24,000 to £36,000 of working time. It would be misleading to claim every minute could turn into profit, but it is still time the business is paying for and not getting back.
The same goes for an ageing laptop. An £800 replacement may look easy to postpone. If the person using the old one loses ten minutes a working day to loading, crashes and restarts, that is around 40 hours a year, or about £800 of time at £20 an hour. The apparent saving starts to look less convincing.
And speed is only one part of it. Perhaps an application freezes whenever the team is busiest, or you pay for several tools that do roughly the same job because nobody has stepped back to see what is being used. Perhaps an invoice is downloaded, renamed, emailed, copied into a spreadsheet and entered again elsewhere. Individually, those steps seem harmless. Across a week, they can eat into the time you wanted your team to spend with clients or on the work that actually brings money in. Looking at the process as well as the software may reveal a simpler way to do it.
Look at the working day, not just the IT bill
Dillan’s point is that a good IT review should begin with the people using the systems. What takes longer than it should? Which jobs are still done by hand? What have people learned to work around? A half-hour conversation with the team may tell you more than a list of hardware.
Then look at the risks you would feel immediately if something failed. What happens if the internet goes down, a key laptop dies or an important file is deleted? Which software subscriptions are actually being used? Is your data backed up, and has anyone checked that it can be restored? When a critical system is fixed within an hour, that may sound like good support, but if 30 people could not work during that hour, the business still lost 30 hours.
There are also the problems you may never notice until a bad day. Who can access the company’s files, and does that change when people join or leave? Are updates being applied across every device, or left to each person to remember? A backup sounds reassuring, but it is only useful if the information can actually be recovered when needed. These are not questions a busy founder should have to answer alone. They are the sort of things a proper review can bring into focus, alongside the day-to-day frustrations that prompted the conversation in the first place.
“Fixing problems quickly matters,” says Dillan. “Preventing them is better.” That means monitoring equipment, applying updates, spotting failing hardware and addressing recurring issues before they disrupt everyone’s day. For Mani Life, that meant putting stronger foundations in place as it expanded. For another business, the useful starting point might be one recurring fault or a process that has grown far more complicated than it needs to be.
Not every annoyance calls for an immediate purchase or a complete overhaul. Sometimes the sensible commercial choice is to leave something alone for now. But it helps to know what that choice is costing, rather than accepting a clunky system because everyone has become used to it.
“Ultimately,” says Dillan, “technology should give people time back.” Having spent enough mornings waiting for a computer to respond, I think that is a goal most of us can get behind.
If this sounds familiar, Dillan and the Microtech team offer an informal review of what you already have: what works, where time or money is being lost, and which risks deserve attention.
Dillan Shikotra, Managing Director, Microtech
dillan@microtechdigital.net | www.microtechdigital.net
