Laptop support for a ten-person consultancy with no IT department

Ten people, ten laptops, nobody in-house

A consultancy that works with businesses on social impact runs from a converted-warehouse office south of the river. There are about ten staff and roughly as many laptops. There is no IT person, and no budget for one.

What they have instead is a habit, and it is a better one than plenty of firms twice their size manage. Their laptops are numbered. When something misbehaves, it gets written down against the machine’s number, with a screenshot. When the list is worth a visit — or a new starter is due — the office manager emails and books us in: “We have one new laptop to set up for a new team member, and some minor issues with existing laptops. I wonder if you would be free on Monday to come in?”

That single email is the whole story. It turns IT from an emergency into an appointment.

What a visit actually looks like

Two hours on site, three jobs, every one of them known before our team walked through the door.

• Build the new starter’s laptop. Set up from scratch during the visit, so the new team member had a working machine rather than a box.
• Laptop number 08, dropping Wi-Fi. The fault list put it precisely: the Wi-Fi cutting out repeatedly, in whatever location the laptop was being used, including in the office when no other laptop had any trouble. That last clause is the useful part. It rules out the office network and points straight at the machine — which is exactly why a written fault report beats “the internet’s playing up”.
• The “bad image” error. Another laptop threw a bad image error message every time it started and the user logged on. Alarming to look at, and a normal fault to work through when you have the machine in front of you.

A pattern, not a contract

We should be straight about the size of this. It is four or five visits of two to three hours across 18 months — a new-user setup and an old laptop reset, then a service pass across all eight laptops, then a three-hour visit, then the one above. It is not a managed contract and we have never sold it as one.

That is genuinely what IT support looks like for a firm of this size. You do not need somebody watching your estate around the clock. You need somebody who knows which laptop is number 08, turns up when you have gathered enough work to fill a morning, and leaves with the list empty.

About this case study

The client is anonymised. The laptop numbers, the faults and the visits are real, and the work was delivered by our team. Planned visits like these are the everyday shape of our business device support, with new-device setup folded into the same trip. Firms that grow past this point tend to move on to managed IT support — but there is no reason to get there early, and we say so.