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Hosted by Ben Thompson, the Oxford Business Podcast is a monthly podcast featuring conversations with experts in a range of fields including marketing, finance and sales.
Ben Thompson - 0:07
Hello, this is the Oxford Business Podcast of the Oxford Business Community Network at Story Ninety-Four's wonderful podcast studio in Oxford. Today I'm joined by a good friend of mine, an entrepreneur, James Craddock, owner of Get Support IT services and also Get Radio. Welcome, James.
James Craddock - 0:23
Good morning.
Ben Thompson - 0:24
So James, start by telling those listening all about yourself and Indeed Get Support IT services.
James Craddock - 0:31
This is always a difficult question Ben, but I guess if I start with myself, what I enjoy in life, I love food, I love to cook, music, I absolutely love going to music festivals, gigs, especially the big outdoor ones, and I also DJ a bit. I guess when it comes to business, that's another passion that I love personally. What I like about business is the ability to help people achieve their objectives and deliver massive value. I guess I started out doing my A-levels at 16. I started doing further maths and physics, but I also got a part-time job. My part-time job was to look after IT for a small business with, I think, just three people working for it. That went on and it grew over a number of years to be sold for north of £10 million, so quite a good introduction to IT. I got a massive buzz from doing deals and being able to help people and talk to people during the day. So I actually ended up leaving my A-levels after the first term to go and focus on business.
Ben Thompson - 1:37
Amazing, amazing. One of the things I've always seen with you is that you've always been really, really passionate about IT and you've also been really passionate about helping people with their IT. Where did that passion come from? You mentioned your first job there, but what I guess gives you the twinkle in the eye about learning how to fix something with a computer or learning how to help someone?
James Craddock - 1:57
So I guess my father was an electronics engineer by degree and when I was born, he sort of stopped work and retrained himself in electronics with real-time computer control and that went on to becoming an IT consultant and eventually focusing on Microsoft. I grew up in a house full of computers and I've always found IT easy and rather fun and I guess at the age of 16 when I started out, before that I've always liked helping people and back then businesses were getting their first computers, people in their homes if they were lucky enough were getting their first computers and it was all confusing and there was lots of technical jargon and other bits and pieces and I found that if I helped people and I spoke to them like another human being, listen to they wanted and worked out ways of saving them time and adding value using IT and explaining everything in plain English, they'd give me money and that seemed like a fairly fun and fair exchange.
Ben Thompson - 3:02
I'm really glad you touched on that because one of my earliest memories of getting to know you and getting to know Get Support IT services was IT support in plain English. Did that phrase come at the start of the planning? Was that what the business was about? Or when did that come in?
James Craddock - 3:17
That's a good question. I guess it's always been there because most people don't like IT like I like IT. Most people don't really care. They don't want to know why something's gone wrong and the technical aspects of it. They just want their computer to work and to serve them in their daily life or their daily job and it's always been at the cornerstone and everything I've ever done is to break IT down into easy-to-understand English that anybody can get on board with.
Ben Thompson - 3:49
And you and the team at Get Support do exactly that. So let's build on Get Support a little bit. Tell the listeners who Get Support are and what the business looks like currently.
James Craddock - 3:59
Well, as I started off self-employed at 16, a good few years before Get Support was born, In February of 2000, I came up with the name of Get Support. I'm very much a fan of a company name that sort of says what it does on the tin. I was self-employed for the first few years, again, helping people get their first computers and doing everything in plain English and just trying to be super helpful and that was quite fun. I was waking up and starting work at 7am and finishing at 8pm and I had phones strapped to my ears for most of the day because we didn't have all the fantastic remote technology that we do today. So a lot of it was closing your eyes and talking people through fixing problems on their computers, just using a phone with nothing in front of you. And I started bringing people in to help me in, I guess, 2004, I think, and Rohan, my business partner and long-term friend, joined in 2006 to help build the team.
Ben Thompson - 5:01
Amazing, amazing and continuing with Get Support, what's happened next? Where are you today?
James Craddock - 5:06
So after Rohan joined, we sort of shored up the brand and got our brand values in there and worked out where we were going to go next, and we've expanded the team. At the heart of it, we're the outsourced IT support department, and we deliver rock-solid IT that's secure, cost-effective, fast and reliable for businesses of all shapes and sizes. When it comes to support, we provide IT support, break/fix, so you've got a problem with your computer, you give us a call or drop us an email and we fix it. We do a lot of proactive support, so we're working in the background to spot problems before our clients notice them and then we go and fix them, which massively reduces problems, downtime, and the need for people to call us. We do everything that you'd expect from a corporate IT support department, including Microsoft 365, we're a direct partner for them, internet services, broadband, fibre, voice over IP, more or less everything you need from an IT support department and cybersecurity is at the heart of everything we do. We now have a team of about 30 and we've got three offices, the head office is here in Oxfordshire and then we've got an office in London and one in Reading too and I guess what that illustrates is that we have the resource to deal with whatever is thrown at us rather than just me at home on my own with a couple of phones and it just means that we can deal with all problems.
Ben Thompson - 6:35
Amazing. No, thank you for that overview. I guess the next thing that would be really, really good to touch on and you actually touched on that in your introduction is let's start with Office 365 because it's something that I've got from Get Support and it works really, really well. But I do know that there's a lot of functionality within Office 365 that a lot of businesses aren't using at the moment. So can you, I'm putting you on the spot a little bit here, but can you kind of give a little bit of an overview of what is Office 365 and why should businesses use it and what can they use it for?
James Craddock - 7:08
Microsoft Office 365 is Microsoft's sort of cloud solution for businesses of all sizes. They've got other solutions like Azure, which gets a lot more technical, But Microsoft 365 delivers all the fundamental services that the majority of businesses need for their daily IT. So at the cornerstone of that, it's Microsoft Exchange email, advanced email that's feature-rich so you can set out-of-office replies, you can share your calendars, you can even share your email and then they have a platform called SharePoint. Now SharePoint is Microsoft's document management system, and it does many things. But one of the things that it's most popular for in the small business world is the ability to share files amongst team members. Then you've got OneDrive, which is actually a document library within SharePoint that allows you to store your personal documents, personal to you but your business as well, sort of your My Documents in the cloud and then you've got Teams, which has become hugely popular over the last couple of years, But it does a lot more than just video and audio. You can use it as a telephone, interfacing with a public telephone network and making calls to any phone numbers and you can use it to collaborate online with your team, share work, work on the same documents at the same time, just a place where you can collaborate and then there are a host of other services such as Microsoft To-Do and Microsoft Planner, lots of other smaller apps that are useful in everyday life and work.
Ben Thompson - 8:50
Amazing. One of the goals of this podcast is to tell the stories of entrepreneurs across Oxfordshire and OBCN members, but also is to really provide really, really honest, useful tips and advice and certainly in that short overview, you've certainly done that from Office 365. Just a couple of things I just want to kind of clarify is you mentioned that there's kind of the calendar function and you mentioned that there's team which does video calls. So I know a lot of businesses that I see are spending licenses on calendly. Something along those lines and there's also the zoom etc etc. and Dropbox that the businesses are spending money on. Do they not need to do that then?
James Craddock - 9:35
Microsoft has a host of services and it has something called Microsoft Bookings, which will allow you to share a link with your customers or your contacts, and then they can book themselves in for a meeting. That ticks that box, and it's included with the majority of subscriptions. In terms of Dropbox, you can get similar functionality, but with a whole load more features with SharePoint, and again, that's included in the majority of subscriptions. There are some reasons to use third-party, other systems, but the majority of businesses will be absolutely fine on Microsoft 365 and once you have the license, you're paying for the services anyway. If you use all of these other services, you need to have a proper review as to what you can get out of Microsoft 365 and get your IT service provider, your IT support company, to talk you through the features, set you up a demo, and see if it will replace your current offerings from the third parties or potentially provide better features that encourages more productivity in your team because right now it's all about making sure that you don't want anything on the cheap, you want good rock solid IT, but you want to make sure you're getting massive value out of everything you've got. So it's definitely worth a review if you're using Dropbox and various other services.
Ben Thompson - 10:59
Amazing. Now, really, really good advice and certainly I do know this because you told me recently, but not until quite recently. So that's really, really useful. One of the other things that is a bit of a pet peeve of mine, and maybe this is just because I'm a little bit of a snob, but I'm going to say it anyway, is when you see really big businesses or certainly professional businesses who have their email address as fredcooper@btinternet.com or CarValetin@aol.com. Should businesses not have that and what is the process of getting an email address that is in line with your website URL?
James Craddock - 11:36
So first of all I don't think it looks particularly professional. You can go and sign up for a Hotmail address or Outlook.com address in 30 seconds and you know if you're using one of those. It's fine. You're not an IT expert. It's probably because you don't understand the inner workings of email. But for me, with a business, it's all about creating a brand image and if you've got a domain name, so our domain name is getsupport.co.uk, your email addresses will be at that domain name, which looks a lot nicer. But furthermore, you own the domain name. If you carry on paying the yearly fee, it's yours forever and it's independent of the provider you originally bought it from. You can move it around and if you use it in something like Microsoft 365, again, if you have that set up properly by a Microsoft partner, you can move your Microsoft 365 tenant around rather than being tied into one provider. Now, Outlook, Hotmail, fantastic. It's a Microsoft service and it's well-funded, but you have no control over it. If the company that's running the free email service decides to change the rules, decides to change what you can do with it, decides to turn it off, then you potentially lose the way that your customers are contacting you. If you own the domain, it's yours and if your current service provider gets into difficulty or changes their business model, you can move it to someone else and keep the same contact details that all your customers have.
Ben Thompson - 13:07
That's really good advice, James, really good advice. I'm going to continue the note of, I guess, kind of something that's quite fearful for a lot of businesses is this dirty word of cyber-security. So I know that as business owners, we read a lot, don't we? And we hear a lot about cyber-security attacks and what we should have cyber-security protection and insurances, etc, etc. But can you, I guess in your own words, in plain English, of Get Support, give the listeners a little bit of an overview of what is cyber security and what really is the threat to the small independent business and indeed what should we be doing under that umbrella?
James Craddock - 13:43
Cyber-security is effectively keeping yourself, your data, secure online and a lot of IT companies and professionals go in with the scare stories and there are plenty of them but there's a load of things that you can do as a small business to make yourself more secure and tick a lot of the cybersecurity boxes and one of the things that's more or less free and really important is cybersecurity awareness at a user level. When a box pops up on your screen and says, "Do you want to do something?" and you go, "Yes," or "No," or "Cancel," or even "Run," always click "Cancel" or "No" unless you know what that box is actually asking you. Or pick the phone up to your IT provider and ask for help. Again, if you get an email telling you that something is going massively wrong with one of your online accounts, maybe Microsoft 365, it's likely to be a phishing attack and a phishing attack is where a scammer will create a very realistic email from one of your providers and encourage you to go to a website that looks identical to the website you normally log on to your provider with, but it's not, the address is different, and they encourage you to put your username and your password in and as soon as you do that, you end up handing them over to the scammer. Now, there are lots of things that you can do as well, which is all part of cybersecurity awareness. You can make sure you've got strong and complex passwords. You can make sure that you use a different, unique, complex, strong password for every single service that you use. You can use a password manager to help you manage that so you don't have to remember lots of passwords. But, Ben, I guess there's a whole host of things that you can do and you should do with cyber-security awareness. I'm very conscious that I don't want to make a definitive list today because cyber-security is so important for all businesses, all individuals, all members of a team. I mean, there are loads of scams that happen when someone joins a team where they're convinced to go and do things to impress their boss and spend their own money on it and it's just such an easy area to tick a load of boxes and make sure that new starters and even people that have been in your team for a long time know how to stay safe.
Ben Thompson - 16:03
No, absolutely and yeah, really, really good advice there. It's certainly… I can absolutely see when somebody joins a business or when they get an email saying the boss says pay this amount, it can happen. So no, really, really good advice there and would certainly urge the listeners to review what they're doing currently. So is there anything else under the cyber-security umbrella? You touched on user awareness. What else do businesses need to do?
James Craddock - 16:27
There's a huge amount that they can do to stay safe, but I'm going to just touch on one of those things right now, which is have some great security software. Everybody must have, as a minimum, decent antivirus, but there's something better now called endpoint detection response. Antivirus has been around for ages and it relies on a database of viruses, sort of like fingerprints of what a virus looks like, and it compares files you're opening to those fingerprints and spots a virus and stops it and keeps your computer secure. But there's a lag when a new virus comes out or a new bit of malware between the malware getting out there and the databases being updated. So the new way to protect computers, which is relatively inexpensive, is using something called EDR, or Endpoint Detection Response, where in addition to the virus database, it also looks at what's going on on the computer, what different programs and processes are doing on the computer, and it uses AI to spot patterns that look like a virus, and then it will stop them regardless of what's in the database and keep the computer safe. One of the pieces of software we use is SentinelOne, and it's incredibly good at stopping things before they really get started.
Ben Thompson - 17:47
Amazing. One thing that we're taught not to do that often, but I'm going to do it now if you don't mind James, is cyber-security, we're told it's very expensive. What sort of cost would be associated with a piece of software like that?
James Craddock - 18:01
So Endpoint Detection Response Sentinel-1 from us is £4.50 per device per month.
Ben Thompson - 18:08
Oh wow.
James Craddock - 18:09
Which excludes VAT, but it is more than anti-virus, so it comes in at about £2. But it takes security to the next level, and it's one of the many things we can do to help keep computers online and I guess while we're talking about cybersecurity, we should also talk about device encryption, making sure that your laptops are encrypted. If you're using Windows, for instance, you should use BitLocker. Now, this is one thing that many businesses don't understand when they go out and buy their first computer. You need Windows Professional to use BitLocker. There are a whole host of other features that Windows Professional brings, but BitLocker is so important. It allows you to have your computers completely encrypted so that, without your username and password to log in, no one can get access to your data. If you don't have your computers encrypted, it's very easy booting off USB sticks or taking a hard drive out to read the data on it and I don't know if you know, if you lose a laptop, if it's stolen from your car, say at a service station, if it's not encrypted, it's a potential data breach and you need to inform the information commissioner's office.
Ben Thompson - 19:20
Wow.
James Craddock - 19:21
If it is encrypted, you note it down in your instant book and get on with your life. So for any business, any business that is dealing with personal data as defined under GDPR, which is more or less all of us, you really need to keep all of your portable devices at a minimum encrypted.
Ben Thompson - 19:41
Perfect, perfect. We've touched on a lot of this already. But I'm just going to bring the conversation on slightly to that very much startup phase. So if you're starting up a business or a small independent that doesn't really have IT in place, we've touched on cybersecurity, we've touched on Office 365 a little bit. But what should a small business do under the IT umbrella? What are the first things to touch on?
James Craddock - 20:02
So let's say they're starting off, they haven't bought their first computer. Number one is if you're going for Windows, buy Microsoft Windows Professional on the machine. It's so much cheaper and more cost-effective to do it in your initial purchase rather than buy a cheaper laptop with Windows Home and then have to upgrade it. I'd recommend going for Microsoft 365 immediately and making sure that's backed up by a third party. That's a very sensible thing to do and if you get everything right in the first place, it's much easier when you take on your first employee and you start to grow. You've got the understanding and the systems on how to scale that out. Make sure that everybody, yourself included, understands cyber-security through the cyber-security user awareness I've been talking about and fairly early on, as you start to plan the business, if you have a business plan, should have an IT plan and strategy that matches that business plan so you know what you're going to need from your IT when you hit each milestone or when you hit your goals in your business plan, I see that IT strategy should be there to support a business, the people working in it, but also the objectives in the business plan because IT can be so powerful in helping you get there.
Ben Thompson - 21:16
No, absolutely. Absolutely. One of the things I think would be really fun to talk about probably won't impact that many businesses across Oxfordshire but you also own Get Radio and I think a lot of us are secret geeks and really interested in the tech behind a radio station. What is the tech behind Get Radio and how did you do it?
James Craddock - 21:37
So I'm going to say it's really simple but it's probably not to you if you're listening at home There's a bit of audio engineering that goes into it, but a very basic setup with a mixer. A mixer is a device that allows you to take multiple audio sources, like the microphones Ben and I are talking to you on now, and mix them together along with the music so you can talk over the top of songs and make it sound really good and then that all goes through a load of processing. What processing does in the radio world is it makes the microphone sound really booming and radio-like and adds extra energy into the music and makes everything come out at a similar volume. So if you listen to the radio, you don't tend to get those fades at the end of tracks. You sort of go from one track into a bit of production. The production is the bit between the tracks that makes it sound like a radio station and then it goes out to, in our case, a DAB digital multiplex, where it gets transmitted across the whole of Oxfordshire, and various online streaming feeds, so you can pick it up on your smart speaker, your mobile phone, and of course online on the website and what holds all of the music together, what plays the music and the production, is something called a playout system where we have some magical code that helps us deliver our amazing fun and engaging music mix because there's a lot of work that goes into making sure the right music is played to keep everybody from your sort of millennials all the way through to your seasoned business owner glued to the radio all day long.
Ben Thompson - 23:21
Amazing. Amazing. For those listening at home, I would have loved this to have been a video format because James has a huge grin across his face when talking about this. So no, thank you for that. So that is the end of this episode of the Oxford Business Podcast of the Oxford Business Community Network. Thank you so much, James, for spending your time to join us today and share such insight with those listening at home and in their offices. It's been really, really insightful. Thank you to Story Ninety-Four for hosting us at the Oxford Podcast Studio. The only in Oxfordshire. So if you've never been to a podcast studio definitely get in touch with them and see if you can get yourself a visit. That's amazing. So thank you so much for listening and we will see you on the next episode.