A business growing faster than its IT

Client and context

Joe runs JMC Bespoke Interiors. There is a workshop, and around twenty people in it.

The business has grown quickly. Quicker, by his own account, than he has been able to keep up with, which is the only part of what they do that matters here.

The problem

There was no IT to speak of. A laptop and an email account, and everything else bought as it occurred to him: a machine for a new starter, cameras, a clocking-in terminal ordered online one afternoon.

None of that is unusual for a business that has grown at speed. It is what most workshops of twenty people look like. The difficulty is that each purchase solves the thing in front of you and quietly creates the next problem: an account nobody set up properly, a device nobody enrolled, a system nobody can get the recordings off when it matters.

Joe did not need a strategy document. He needed somebody to answer the phone, come and look at the actual building, and make each of these things work properly and in a way that would still make sense in a year.

What we did

Three pieces of work across the summer of 2026, each of which arrived as a small request.

A new starter, set up properly. Joe took on a project coordinator and asked us to set up her laptop. That turned into doing it once and doing it right: a new Microsoft 365 account, the device joined to Entra ID, multi-factor authentication from the first day rather than as an afterthought, and a shared mailbox so that work does not disappear into one person’s inbox.

The part worth noting is the mailbox that came next. Accounts was separated into its own mailbox that the new coordinator cannot see. Five minutes at setup, a tedious afternoon later, and the difference between an email system and a business that can grow without rewriting who sees what.

CCTV across the workshop. The brief was “some cameras”. As usual, the requirement only appeared once somebody went and looked: coverage of the workshop floor, viewable from a phone when Joe is away from the business, and recordings kept for thirty days and no longer.

We specified the system, supplied it through our trade account with a security distributor, and installed it: cabling and cameras fitted by our installers, and retention set as an explicit thirty-day policy on the recorder with storage sized above worst-case bitrate. That distinction matters more than it sounds. Size the disk to roughly thirty days and real retention drifts with how busy the workshop has been: a hectic fortnight gives you twenty-three days, a quiet Christmas gives you forty. Set the policy and over-provision the disk, and thirty days means thirty days.

Retention is a decision, not an accident. It is also not the only part of a camera system that carries legal weight: cameras pointed at a workplace bring obligations around notice and lawful basis that sit with the business owner rather than the installer, and we said so, more than once.

A clocking-in terminal, which Joe had already bought himself. It needed a DHCP reservation, a cable and somebody to configure it, so we got it working and told him plainly that it sits outside what we support. Knowing what you are and are not responsible for is most of what a handover is.

And the conversation that is still going. We have been pressing Joe to look at the whole estate rather than the next thing on the list. He is busy running a business growing faster than he expected, so it moves at his pace. That is honest, and it is where a good many engagements of this kind actually sit.

Outcome

A new coordinator who was productive on her first day, on a device joined to the company’s Microsoft 365 directory, with multi-factor authentication and access to what she needs and nothing she does not.

A workshop Joe can see from his phone, recording to a defined retention period rather than indefinitely.

A clocking system that works, and a clear line about who supports it.

No dashboard and no percentage improvement. What changed is that three things which would otherwise have been bodged now work correctly, and there is somebody to ring who already knows how the building is wired.

Stack used

Microsoft 365, Entra ID device join, multi-factor authentication, shared and segregated mailboxes. IP CCTV with defined retention. Cabling and installation by our contractors.