IT support in Kimberley: small-town firms, properly covered

Which Kimberley businesses does SetWeb work with?

Kimberley’s business character was set by the Hardys & Hansons brewery and the trades that grew up around it. The brewery closed in 2006 and its site has since been redeveloped, but the town kept a base of small trade and light industrial firms on its edges. They are typically five to twenty people, family-run or owner-managed, and their technology has usually accumulated rather than been designed.

Along Main Street and Eastwood Road the picture is independent retail, food, health and beauty and small professional practices, businesses where one till system or booking diary going down is the whole afternoon. Nobody in these firms has time to be the person who is good with computers, and in most of them somebody has ended up being exactly that anyway.

The town’s position beside junction 26 of the M1 pulls in distribution and trade businesses whose vans are the operation. For those, the recurring work is less about the office and more about getting paperwork off a phone and into a system without anyone typing it twice.

Giltbrook, on the town’s western side, has the retail park and the IKEA store, which draw traffic from across the county onto the A610. For a small firm in Kimberley that mostly means busy roads at weekends, but it also means the town is easy to reach from both the city and the Erewash valley, which suits firms whose customers are spread across both.

Most businesses here are small enough that one person’s laptop effectively is the business. The useful work is therefore unglamorous: backing that laptop up properly, moving the business email onto a domain the firm owns rather than a personal address, and setting up a second machine that could take over on the day the first one fails. None of it takes long, and every part of it is easier before the failure than after.

The brewery also left Kimberley with a good number of pubs, and hospitality is still a visible part of the local trade. A pub or café here usually runs a till system, card terminals, a booking diary and customer Wi-Fi off one broadband line and one router, often all on the same network. Separating the customer Wi-Fi from the till, and making sure a dropped line does not stop card payments on a Friday night, are the two jobs that matter most.

Kimberley sits in Broxtowe borough, on the hill above the A610, with Nuthall and Watnall close by toward the motorway. Most of the firms that call themselves Kimberley businesses are spread across that NG16 patch rather than packed into the centre, and a visit often means a unit on the edge of the town, a converted barn or a home office in one of the newer streets rather than a shopfront on Main Street.

Being a small town, Kimberley firms also tend to stay with a supplier for a long time once they find one that works, which is good news until that supplier retires. A surprising amount of the work we are asked to do here is a handover: taking over from a one-person IT business that is winding down, finding out what they set up, and getting the passwords, licences and domain logins into the firm’s own hands before the last invoice is paid.

For the full picture of what is covered day to day, see our full range of IT services, or the county-wide overview of IT support in Nottinghamshire.

A good share of it is for trades and home-services businesses, where the office is a van and the work happens at somebody else's address. If that is your line of work, there is more on IT Support for Trades.