This episode of The Next Biz Thing turns its attention to Radorfa ICT Group, a Dutch technology company built around a single blunt promise: stop doing the manual work. Markus explores how Radorfa brings ICT management and security, Microsoft 365, Odoo ERP and custom software development together under one roof, and why that one partner model matters so much for mid market businesses drowning in spreadsheets and disconnected systems. Along the way the episode looks at the quiet shift from buying more technology to properly connecting what already exists. Worth a listen for anyone who still exports a file every Monday.
What if the single biggest thing holding your business back is not your product, not your people, and not your market, but a spreadsheet? Not a dramatic failure, not a crisis, just a quiet file that somebody opens every Monday morning, copies numbers into, saves, emails around, and then opens again on Tuesday to do it all over again. Multiply that by every department, every week, every year, and you start to see the real cost. It is not measured in software licences. It is measured in the hours of skilled people who were hired to think, spending their days moving data from one box to another.
Welcome back to The Next Biz Thing. I am Markus J. Diplama, and every episode I go looking for the companies that are quietly building something better, the ones solving problems that most of us have simply learned to live with. Today I want to talk about a business in the Netherlands that has built its entire identity around one deceptively simple promise: stop doing the manual work. Let me introduce you to Radorfa ICT Group.
Radorfa is a Dutch technology company, and the line they lead with on their own website is refreshingly blunt. Stop met handmatig werk. Automatiseer je bedrijfsprocessen. Stop with the manual work. Automate your business processes. There is no jargon in that. No talk of synergies or paradigms. Just a direct statement of what is wrong and what they intend to do about it. And I have come to appreciate companies that lead with the problem rather than the product, because it tells you they have actually sat in a room with a frustrated operations manager and watched the problem happen.
Here is what makes Radorfa genuinely interesting to me. Most technology companies pick a lane and stay in it. You have the managed service providers who keep your network running and your firewalls patched. You have the software houses who build you a custom application and then hand you the keys. You have the ERP consultants who live inside one platform. And you have the Microsoft specialists who handle your email and your Teams and your SharePoint. Four different companies, four different contracts, four different account managers, and four different answers when something breaks in the gap between them.
Radorfa's position is that those gaps are the whole problem. Their tagline is Een partner, alle ICT. One partner, all ICT. And they have built the company to actually stand behind that rather than just print it on a brochure. Under one roof they run ICT management and security, including network management, cybersecurity, firewall protection, monitoring, backup, and round the clock support. They run Microsoft 365 as a specialism, which covers email migrations, Exchange management, SharePoint, Teams, security, workplace management, and Power Automate. They implement and support Odoo, the ERP platform, including migrations, process optimisation, and custom modules. And they build software from scratch, web applications, Windows applications, automations, API integrations, dashboards, and the connectors that make separate systems finally talk to each other.
Now, on paper that is a long list. But listen to what it actually adds up to in practice, because the combination is the point. Imagine you are a mid sized logistics business. Your orders arrive in one system. Your warehouse runs on another. Your finance team works in a third. And between all three sits a person whose actual job title has nothing to do with data entry, exporting one file and importing it into the next. A managed service provider cannot fix that, because it is not a network problem. A software house can build you a connector, but they do not know your infrastructure. An ERP consultant will tell you to move everything into the ERP. Radorfa can look at the whole picture, because they own the whole picture. That is not a marketing advantage. That is a structural one.
Their philosophy sits in one short Dutch sentence on their about page. Wij maken technologie eenvoudig. We make technology simple. And I think simplicity is one of the most underrated goals in this entire industry. It is very easy to make software complicated. It takes real discipline and real experience to look at a tangle of systems and processes and produce something a person can actually use without a training course. Radorfa describe their method as translating a business need quickly into working solutions that grow with the business. Two ideas are packed in there. Quickly, meaning you see value before the enthusiasm wears off. And grow with the business, meaning the thing you build this year is not the thing you have to throw away next year.
The industries they focus on tell you something as well. Healthcare, retail, logistics, manufacturing, and professional services. These are not glamorous sectors in technology terms. Nobody writes breathless articles about warehouse inventory reconciliation. But these are the industries where operational drag is most expensive and most invisible, where a company can be profitable and growing and still be quietly bleeding hours into processes nobody has looked at in a decade. Choosing to work there says something about where a company thinks the real value is.
The pain points Radorfa name are wonderfully specific, and specificity is usually a sign that somebody has been in the room. Processes that depend on Excel. Systems that do not connect to each other. A lack of real time insight into what is actually happening in the business. Every operations leader listening to this just nodded. Those three sentences describe an enormous share of the mid market economy. And the reason they persist is not that the technology to fix them does not exist. It is that fixing them requires somebody who understands both the business process and the technical stack, and those people are genuinely rare.
The team reflects that. Their specialists span software development, IT consultancy, network security, user experience and interface design, and support. I want to draw attention to the design piece specifically, because it is unusual in this category. Plenty of technical firms will build you an automation. Fewer of them care whether the dashboard is legible, whether the workflow makes sense to the person using it at eight in the morning, whether the thing is pleasant to use. Automation that people quietly work around is not automation. Having user experience thinking sat next to the network security people is a real signal about how seriously they take adoption rather than just delivery.
Their clients talk about professionalism, fast response, technical depth, and solutions that save time. Those four things are worth separating, because they are not the same quality. Technical depth without responsiveness is a firm you cannot reach. Responsiveness without depth is a friendly help desk that escalates everything. Getting both, and pairing them with the sort of round the clock availability Radorfa maintain, is genuinely hard to run as a business. And that last one, solutions that save time, is the only measure that ultimately matters, because it is the one that shows up in the accounts.
So why does any of this matter beyond one Dutch company and its clients? Because I think we are living through a quiet correction in how businesses think about technology. For a long stretch the story was about acquisition. Buy the platform, buy the suite, buy the seats, and transformation would follow. What a lot of organisations actually ended up with was a larger collection of systems that still did not talk to each other, and a workforce doing the integration by hand. The interesting work now is not in buying more. It is in connecting what already exists, removing the manual steps between systems, and giving people back the hours. That is unglamorous, deeply practical work, and it is exactly the ground Radorfa have planted themselves on.
There is also something worth saying about the one partner model in an era of specialisation. The received wisdom is that you hire the best in each category. But that assumes the categories match the problem, and increasingly they do not. When your automation problem is one third network, one third ERP configuration, and one third custom code, three excellent specialists will each solve their third and leave you holding the seams. The integrator who can see across all of it is worth more than the sum of the specialists, and I suspect we are going to see more companies rediscover that.
If you run a business where somebody is still exporting a file every Monday, or where your systems each hold a different version of the truth, or where you cannot answer a simple question about today's numbers without three people checking three screens, then Radorfa ICT Group is worth a look. They are based in the Netherlands, they work across healthcare, retail, logistics, manufacturing, and professional services, and they have built themselves specifically for the problem of making separate systems behave like one. Go and read how they describe the work, because the clarity of it tells you a lot about how they think.
That is where I will leave it for today. If this episode made you look at one of your own processes a little differently, then it did its job. Go and find that spreadsheet. You know the one.
I have been Markus J. Diplama, this has been The Next Biz Thing, and I will see you in the next one.