I think they just kind of get business. I don’t want to know about a motherboard or infrastructure. Whereas some of the other companies kind of looked at me a bit strangely that I didn’t want to know. We’ve been using Totality now for about six or seven years. Previous to that, we went through people so quickly. You know, they come in, they talk a good game, they get you to sign up and then you phone up and it’s almost like you’re putting them out. They weren’t interested in adding value in any way, we were a name on a balance sheet, spreadsheet, we were nothing to them. Now if you have a small team and one computer is down productivity will fall.

So when we made the switch to Totality it was really refreshing that when something happened, and things do happen and they’ll happen every day, then we just get on our with daily life quite quickly. It’s just done, which is what people want. I am very open and honest that I’m quite naïve when it comes to the technology side of things. One of the big things that they organised for us early on was to get fibre lines into the property. So for us that was a major change. They told us what it would involve cost-wise, gave us a realistic timeframe and organised the whole thing.

They will tell me that a certain computer is a certain number of years old and maybe now we need to be thinking about upgrading, replacing, changing. And they tell you about little changes in technologies, they’ve saved us a fortune on our phone bills by transferring to another company. They have a really good level of staff retention, so there’s people that we’ve known since we’ve been dealing with them from day one. So you can phone up and say, “Hello Shane, hello Lewis, hello Charlie.”

I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend them. And my single biggest client is now a client of Totality’s. I would definitely not be putting them with a company that I didn’t trust.

During these 18 months, I’ve seen an astronomical growth and improvement in IT. I’m an accountant not [dollars ten] and this has overall cracks of IT but not really the deep down issues. So they come down to our level and explain them really professionally and in a friendly way. When we started looking for IT support, to the point was we are a team of not IT people, we’re not saving that [unintelligible 00:00:32], let us find some IT business who can provided some sort of support.

Being a small company, we cannot afford a full time IT department in-house, we needed somebody who can understand our issues at our level. We don’t want like a big corporate third party, but the approach Totality have is much more different than my previous experience. Those companies were more corporate and, you know, more just like managing an established business.

Whereas Totality, they support a growing business. You know, where it’s changing. We have grown our staff 300 percent in 18 months. When Totality came on board, they’ve been very professional, thorough, explained the needs of the business from IT, security point of view, data storage, backup and how we can work efficiently as a business.

We have a professional call with Pedro every month, where he explains to us what the challenges are nowadays, how we can keep our business more guarded from these threats at the moment. He did propose that our emails are not secure enough because of course nowadays there are much more threats.

They have come with a package which just gives us much more than I was anticipating. The level of support has been very consistent and it’s very helpful, especially when you have 40 staff members, the challenges increase by 40 times all the day to day problems. So that relieves me of, you know, a lot hugely, and I can focus on my like proper day to day job rather than dealing with IT issues, so it gives you a lot of peace of mind. I do strongly recommend them.

For someone who is effectively a technophobe, they’ve made the process of IT support actually enjoyable. Being a theatre company, we have more than one and a half million people come through our doors every year. It’s therefore of paramount importance to us that our systems are working properly. They looked at our current systems, saw where the potential snags and banana skins might be, and helped us to find solutions those before the problems ever became a reality.

They have provided us with on-site support five days a week since the beginning of our contract with them without any hassle at all. Day to day, whenever a member of staff has any issues, they will raise a ticket through the helpdesk portal and we’ve found Totality will normally respond within less than an hour and have a solution in place ready to go.

I’ve found that from the lowest level engineer right to the top of their organisation, Totality have a way of describing things that makes them easy to understand. My background was not IT, my background was very clearly finance and having someone who can explain things to me in layman’s terms has been invaluable.

The great thing about Totality is that even though they’re always working in the background to make sure that our business functions correctly, we don’t notice them unless we need them. Totality have proven to me that an IT company can be a partner, not just a contractor.