Last week, two of our team – Will Bellows and Jordan Geddes – had the pleasure of presenting at the Eastleigh Football Club Business Networking event. It’s always a great room: business owners, self-employed professionals, and people who are genuinely invested in making their businesses work better.
We had 15 minutes. So we kept it tight, kept it honest, and focused on the things we’re actually seeing day-to-day across our client base. No fluff, no jargon – just the reality of what’s happening out there, and what good IT support looks like in 2024.
Here’s a full rundown of everything we covered.
23 years of making technology work
Netserve has been supporting businesses across the south for over 23 years. A lot changes in that time – the tools, the threats, the expectations. But one thing hasn’t: the businesses that thrive are the ones where technology quietly does its job, and when it doesn’t, help arrives fast.
Everything we do sits under three pillars, each with one clear outcome.
Pillar 1: IT Support – Keep people working
When someone in your team can’t work, every minute matters. The last thing they want to do is raise a ticket, get an auto-response, and sit wondering when someone might get back to them.
We’re proud of the standard we hold ourselves to here. Right now, our live KPI sits at 78 working days without dropping a single incoming support call during opening hours. That’s not a target on a slide – it’s a live number we track and publish internally, because we believe accountability matters.
When live help is needed, our aim is simple: get you talking to somebody. A real person who knows what they’re doing, who can take the problem off your hands and get you back to work.
For a lot of businesses, that responsiveness alone is the difference between a frustrating IT experience and one that actually supports growth.
Pillar 2: Cyber Security – Keep the business safe
This is the one that tends to make people sit up a little straighter – and rightly so.
Across our client base of over 2,700 monitored mailboxes, we’re seeing approximately one mailbox compromise every single week. One. Per week. Consistently.
And the pattern is almost always the same: it’s the businesses relying on basic, out-of-the-box mailbox security that are getting caught out. Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace are brilliant tools – but their default security settings were never designed to be your last line of defence.
What does a compromised mailbox actually mean in practice?
It’s easy to think of it as an IT inconvenience. It isn’t. A compromised mailbox means:
- Your clients and suppliers being targeted using your identity
- Breach response and forensic investigation costs
- Potential obligations to report to the ICO
- Customer apology emails and the awkward conversations that follow
- Hours – sometimes days – of lost time you’ll never recover
The reputational damage alone can be severe, especially for smaller businesses where trust is everything.
So what do we do about it?
Our managed security stack uses Huntress – a platform built specifically for small and mid-sized businesses that adds a layer of continuous, 24/7 monitoring with real human security expertise behind it. Not just software scanning for patterns. Actual security professionals investigating threats and responding when something looks wrong.
The cost to protect a mailbox with Huntress? Approximately £5 per month.
That’s less than a coffee. For round-the-clock, human-backed protection on a mailbox that could, if compromised, cost your business thousands.
Prevention is cheaper than recovery. Every single time.
Pillar 3: AI & Automation – Give people time back
AI is everywhere right now – and with it comes a lot of noise, a lot of hype, and frankly a lot of confusion about what it actually means for businesses like yours.
Here’s our take: AI isn’t about replacing your best people. It’s about removing the work that gets in their way.
The repetitive admin. The manual data entry. The copy-paste tasks that eat into the working day and add no real value. That’s where automation earns its keep – quietly handling the low-value work so your team can focus on the things that actually matter.
At Netserve, we combine two things:
- Netserve Safe AI – helping teams adopt AI tools in a way that’s secure, sensible, and governed. Because the risks of unsupervised AI use in a business are real, and most people haven’t thought them through yet.
- Workflow Automation – identifying and removing the repetitive manual tasks from your team’s daily routines.
And it works. Our first automation is going live right now with a groundworks firm, and it’s projected to save approximately 20 hours of manpower per month. That’s half a working week, every month, going back into the business.
Multiply that across a team, across a year, and you start to see why this isn’t just a nice-to-have – it’s a genuine competitive advantage.
What’s your biggest technology headache?
We covered three areas – IT support, cyber security, and AI & automation – but every business is different, and the priority will be different for everyone in that room.
Maybe your team is constantly frustrated by slow response times and unresolved IT issues. Maybe you’ve had a security scare and you’re not sure how protected you really are. Or maybe you know there’s time being wasted on manual tasks but you haven’t had the bandwidth to tackle it.
Whatever it is – we’d love to have a conversation.
Will and Jordan are always happy to chat, no hard sell, just an honest look at where technology could be working harder for your business.
