Local business IT support with a unique subscription model

Hilary Chapman: Hello, we’re here with Fil Strati from TechSeek. These are our top 10 questions. TechSeek provides IT support for small business in Melbourne’s Northwest. And he’s been in business for quite a number of years. So we’ve got an opportunity to ask Fil some burning IT services questions.

So Fil, tell us a little bit about you and how you got into IT.

Fil Strati: I think I started, tinkering around with computers probably in the start of high school. When we all started to get them for the first time, obviously everyone’s, they’re kind of a staple at people’s houses these days.

I started to take an interest in them at that point. And then started looking after everyone else’s computers and started charging my friends and family and, got some bit of money on the side. But then as I grew older and into my studies and stuff, I started to think maybe I should continue this as a career.

What sort of IT am I going to be doing – programming or network support? Just the desktop support, what I’m doing now. And guess that’s led me to where I am now. 

Hilary Chapman: All right. And so how long have you had TechSeek? 

Fil Strati: I started TechSeek in 2006, so I right on about 16 years, I think now it’ll be 16 years in about December.

And I initially started offering IT support for residential. I had a lot of residential customers that had businesses and I started transitioning into servicing businesses. And then what happened was that a lot of these business owners needed more ongoing support and during business hours. I started reducing my hours with my current employer and started kind of juggling a parttime/casual contractor job.

Hilary Chapman: We all do that at some point. Yeah. 

Fil Strati: And then basically tried to do the jump into working full time for myself. And then over the last few years we stopped servicing residential, went full time into servicing businesses and then changed our business model to accommodate more small business owners.

‘Cause we were finding that there was a bit of a gap in the market in terms of how small business owners were being treated in terms of support. And yeah, here we are today! 

Focusing on supporting small businesses locally

Hilary Chapman: Wow. And so what’s the sort of typical size of a business that you support? 

Fil Strati: So the good thing with us is that we service anyone from say two to 50 staff. So we’re not looking for I guess your, your corporates and your sort of 50 and up sort of thing. We’re looking after small business. I guess the biggest issue for us was that there are currently only really two types of business models on the market to support business owners.

And that the higher end is mainly a managed service provider and they tend to look for someone that has 50 seats or more. They’ll install some manage some remote management software and provide analytics and manager server and all this sort of stuff, but doesn’t really work too much.

Now that everyone’s moving away from having inhouse service, it’s more just their own PCs that need to be managed. And a lot of their cloud. Yeah. 

Hilary Chapman: Most things are in the cloud these days, right? Yeah. 

Fil Strati: So our goal’s pretty much to not try and get them stuck into using that old technology, but to move away and find how to use all the new sort of tools to help them collaborate and communicate remotely.

Hilary Chapman: Yeah. So they don’t lose everything when they get rid of their laptop and it’s all on their C drive and they don’t have it anymore. Yeah, 

Fil Strati: Exactly. That’s one side and it can be quite expensive and it’s geared to much bigger business number of more heads in business.

Providing affordable IT support with continuity

And then the other side of the spectrum is basically your Geeks2U, PC Doctor that sort of you know, that reactive type business where they might be made up of say a number of subcontractors and you – there’s a risk that business owners are taking in the sense that they don’t know what level of expertise that tech has versus the last person they saw. They’re going to have to trust them about how things work at their business. Every time a new person comes along, they’re going to have to entrust that person with login passwords.

And you giving them access to your company and personal data, your IP. So there’s a lot of things that people take too much for granted going. Yeah, it’s a different guy at this time, but who cares. And given that every different industry we look after has a different set of software, chiros have chiro software, the dentist, dental, practice management, lawyers have your LEAP and real estate have agents have your Console and RP Office and whatnot.

So we’re always exposed to these different software packages. And again, there’s no guarantee that the tech that comes out is going to know anything about those packages or who to seek help from if they need support relating to error. So you’re taking a big risk basically. And what we’ve done is said, okay we don’t want small business owners to be left behind.

We want to provide a service where we don’t have to hire subcontractors ourselves. We don’t have to put anyone offshore or we don’t have to hire anyone offshore. We wanted someone that was basically, or a number of people that were full time employed here in Melbourne that could not only do remote support, but actually go out on site.

Given that we’re small business owners, it’s very important for us to maintain that relationship and part of that is going in and having a face to talk to, not just, on the phone all the time. 

Hilary Chapman: Absolutely. Like I’ve got a bit of a declaration here that I am actually one of your clients.

And what I really appreciate is just being able to send you an email going, oh my goodness, how do I do this? Or can I, can you help one of my clients with this? And that really helps a lot just knowing who’s on the other end. I know that you’ve got the skills to do it. And you come out with the sensible answers as to how to do it.

Locally-based IT support who speak plain English

Fil Strati: That’s the other thing, I guess that’s important for us when we’re hiring technicians. We getting to make sure that yes, they’re skilled and they know Office 365 and Dropbox and Google Drive and they know how to do backups and all that. And that’s all great. But if they can’t convey that information to someone that doesn’t know any of this stuff, that business owner can’t make an informed decision about how to move forward or what to do, when there is a catastrophe, what choices to make, because you’re using too much tech jargon that it’s going all over their head.

Yeah. Yeah. That’s a big, that’s a big concern. And because it is a small business owner and they’re usually small teams of businesses of staff that we are looking after, they need to have those interpersonal skills. Just, mark everyone down as a number. 

Hilary Chapman: That’s right. It’s no! – You have to move your mouse a little bit to the left! Click there!

Fil Strati: So we do have a ticketing system and that’s great for customers that do want to just quick send a quick email and we can triage, the jobs based on that. But we do obviously have – we’re a phone call away – we do have a reception team that picks up calls if we can’t get to them and logs, what your problem is about so that we can follow up. So it’s all designed so that we can quickly triage the jobs and get to who needs us most first. 

Hilary Chapman: Yeah. Fantastic. And that’s certainly been my experience. I dropped you an email yesterday saying, can you please help out a client with an email? And that was all done the same day. So fabulous. 

SEO and word of mouth as the foundation of getting new clients

So I just want to ask you just , cause obviously we are a marketing business here, so I want to ask then, how do your customers find you?

Fil Strati: New customers? There’s a lot of word of mouth. There’s obviously customers that find us through the networking that we do.

And that can vary from a lot of different networks that I go to. But the most success I’ve had is with SEO. Definitely the fact that we’re able to target specific keywords because I guess in my target market because it’s not residential and because it’s a certain size, I can’t just be chasing keywords “computer repairs Melbourne”, “virus removals” 

Hilary Chapman: That’d be highly competitive, right? 

Fil Strati: Yeah. It’s highly competitive, but I’m also attracting people that want their children’s computers fixed so they can get their homework done, 

Hilary Chapman: Which is not your market. 

Fil Strati: No. 

Hilary Chapman: So you, you’re as much about who you DON’T want is that is about who you DO want, right?

Strati: Yeah. And it’s about making sure that the content reflects that on the website and that the blogs reflect that on the website and all the SEO is targeted specifically. Also, so customers aren’t wasting their time calling us so that, by the time they get on the phone to us or send us an inquiry, they’re already at a point where they understand that we’re a perfect fit for each other. And then go and basically do an onsite audit and talk about their IT needs and pain points.

But yeah, definitely. Definitely Google is one of the big ones for, especially, new inquiries. 

The importance of Google Business Profile reviews

Hilary Chapman: Yes. Okay. And I think you’ve also got an amazing Google Business Profile as well. 

Fil Strati: Yes. And I push that a lot with my clients because it is a free service. The two main things I push them to do is get a Google profile. Otherwise I’ll do one for you in 10 minutes because it’s, again it’s something they should, all…

Hilary Chapman: Everybody should have one. Absolutely, 

Fil Strati: Definitely. And the other thing he’s asking for asking for reviews. A lot of really good customers that really love their service, but they never ask them for a review and they go, they go “yeah”. They never do it. And I have to send out a lot and I might get two or three come back just because the person’s, at that point in time, they’ve got the time to do it, B

Hilary Chapman: But can you just do it by via text message? That’s right. Isn’t it? Yeah. 

Fil Strati: So I’ve saved the link and I send it as a text just saying, “we’d love your feedback”. And it’s usually straight after I hear from someone I’ll say, yep. I’d love your feedback. And if someone’s looking you up on Google or looking you up based on the Google maps listing, they’re going to obviously click on people that have a lot of reviews and high stars. So it’s a, it’s something that a lot of people are missing out on and, it should be a staple as part of their marketing.

Hilary Chapman: It’s also in the Google’s local search algorithm. It’s one of the things – obviously nobody knows exactly what’s in the Google search algorithm – but all the evidence is that, that’s the number of genuine reviews you’ve got is really important. And actually it doesn’t even have to be, a glowing five star across the board, as long as it’s above about four it’ll still rank. So you if you’ve got a lot of reviews and you’ve got the odd, bad one, you don’t necessarily have to worry about it too much. Which is.. 

Fil Strati: You’d want bad feedback as well. We try with our clients, if there’s anything we can change, anything we can improve.

We want to know, we don’t want you to just sit on it and then just leave. You know what I mean? Improve our service. So yes, we love reviews, but I want people’s honest feedback about TechSeek, about how we run the business. Definitely. 

When to ask for a Google review

Hilary Chapman: Yeah. And so what’s the key point at which you decide to send out a review? Is it just after you finished delivering a service for somebody maybe they’ve had a problem and you fixed it. 

Fil Strati: Yeah. Usually like a new customer. I’ll talk to them on the phone or, we’ll send some emails back and forth. I’ll go out and see them. And it’s not sometimes during, after we’ve done an audit, it’s usually going to be they’ve taken us on and they’ve had someone come out and they’ve been really happy with the results.

“I can’t believe this got done so quickly!” Or “I can’t believe how easy this was!” Or whatever the case we’d asked for their feedback. And that, and at that moment, usually they’re pretty happy to just sign in and just get it done. 

What does local business IT support involve?

Hilary Chapman: Yeah. And they’re sitting on their phone having, and they can do it easily when they’re having a coffee or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. I was just going to ask you a few – thank you for that. I was really interested in the marketing side of things – but I want to just ask you a little bit about the services. So what are the three core IT services that most small businesses need. 

Fil Strati: Look, I think IT support is quite broad.

But in that obviously, we’re fixing your things like – issues with email or printing or internet or whatever it is, but you obviously need support for that stuff. You need support for these days for Office 365 or Google Workspace, 

Hilary Chapman: Microsoft 365, I think it just changed its name.

Fil Strati: But they, but that, a lot of a lot of companies will do some stuff that kind of crosses over to that. They’ll pay for, they’ll go and get their domain name and their website. And they’ll do something instead of going say marketing yourself, they’ll just go and themselves or, or Squarespace or whatever.

And they’ll set up things, get stumped when it comes to their email. So we can help that sort of part in terms of helping them transition their domain name to a premium email service like Office 365, Google Workspace. And so supporting with that is one of the key things. The other one – adequate antivirus or internet security.

The importance of IT security and backups

So a lot of people go and get their website done yet. Okay, cool. I’m going to go on Office 365. I’m going to do this. I’m going to do that. And then there’s no antivirus in place. So these programs are great. They’re in the cloud, your files are in the cloud, but you can still infect the files on your computer and that those infections can get uploaded.

So having add and, and obviously stop spam and things like that. So having adequate internet security is another core category, I guess we bring up when I’m doing my audits. So it’s having adequate email having, knowing who your web host is, who your web developer is, all that stuff and supporting that or working with the web developer, having the antivirus in place and the other big one is the backup.

So everyone forgets about backup. So it’s obviously yes. Back up your website as well. 

Hilary Chapman: Yes. Yes. 

Fil Strati: Cause I know you’re doing it. 

Hilary Chapman: I do! I do. I’ve multiple backups of everybody’s websites. Cause I’m paranoid.

People sort say, oh yeah, but it’s being backed up in the cloud and I say, okay, so that, because it’s nothing that gets changed regularly, they do rely on their web developer. And if that’s something that you do, that’s great. But some people just don’t do it. They, or they’ll go for someone that’s a cheap and nasty service. And then they get this sort of slap together website, no backup, no nothing, no support.

No security.

Fil Strati: Yeah, no security. And then the other one is the backup. So yeah, the backup being that, yes, my files are in the cloud. They must be safe, because it’s on Office 365, it’s on OneDrive. It must be safe in the cloud. So we try and show people that you can back up those files to another external service, but also what is the stuff that’s locally on your computer and is that being backed up?

The kind of thing that I usually say to people is if you walked in today and your computer was dead, what would you panic about? What would you need and then thinking about, assessing each program, and does that program have its own backup? Is that program in the cloud?

What is the, what is, what are they required to do as part of their backup? A lot of dental practice software or allied health software, they have backup, but you need to do it yourself. They’ll give you – they won’t do it for you . 

Hilary Chapman: And that’s one of the things that you’re currently working with me is just reviewing, all my backup, but recently, as we had to wipe my new computer because I had a fault in it. It had to be, I forgot the word – reimaged – is that the right word? Yes. 

Fil Strati: Yes. 

How a password manager helps your IT security

Hilary Chapman: And all the software came off it, but because I had all of my passwords saved in LastPass. And we just put the basic software back on and then as I needed to add the software, it was just, it’s just been really simple just to add it all back on because everything was all in the cloud.

The passwords were all there. I didn’t have to panic about where anything was. So it just made that whole process, really smooth. And you guys picked up my computer for me, took it away while I went on holidays. It had a holiday and a facelift as well. and came back all fresh and new. I just plugged it in and kept going.

It was amazing! So thank you. 

Fil Strati: No worries. I guess yeah, talking about that, like password vault. It’s very important. I get too, I see too many customers that have all their passwords stored on a notes file, a notes app on their phone, or they’ve got it in a notepad that’s in their Dropbox folder. It’s just not really compliant.

The biggest local business IT mistakes

Hilary Chapman: No, it’s not good. It’s not good. So what’s speaking of which, what do you, think’s the biggest IT mistake that most small businesses make or that many small businesses make. 

Fil Strati: Look I think based on what I see in my audits is not getting a second opinion. It’s the biggest one. I think people are people have that kind of shiny object syndrome where they just go and buy what they think is going to work for them without consulting someone.

And it’s time and time again, when I go and do these audits, people have purchased way too many licences for the wrong things or the wrong type of licence or they’ve for hosting with the wrong company, or they’ve registered details under the tech’s name or there’s too much control that they don’t have. And so this, and this becomes apparent when and I guess the other thing is they don’t enough – like how can explain it? There’s not enough information given to the actual end user. So when I go and take, when I go and do an audit, I’ll say what’s your backup program, how often you are backing up, where are you backing up?

No one has any idea. And this is a problem because if that IT company suddenly disappears. They’re screwed. Antivirus. Where’s your antivirus paid annually? Is it monthly? What type of antivirus is it? Internet security? Is it just a malware scanner? What does it do? No idea. Where’s your website being hosted? No idea. Who’s…

Hilary Chapman: Yeah, I get that all the time. No idea. I don’t know what the password is. Don’t oh, my, my web developer did the domain for. 

Fil Strati: Who’s managing your Office 365? I don’t know. I’ll have to look at the bill. And then it’s which licences do you have? What do you pay for this? So there’s all this..

Hilary Chapman: Just like giving somebody the deed to your house, isn’t it really? 

Fil Strati: Yeah. And yeah. And that’s the thing. Like someone will go to us. Hey, we want to go ahead with you. We want to get our website, our web posting moved over to you, we don’t know how to log in or where it is. Okay let’s continue using the backup program you have. We don’t know what it is. Or the tech company might withhold that information from them. So it becomes a problem when they go at that point, they go, I don’t have any control over my IT.

Hilary Chapman: Which is their business, right? Most people’s, all of their IP is sitting in the cloud, in their files. 

Fil Strati: A team member leaves and they want to disable their access. And I say, yep, that’s fine. Give me the global admin credentials for Office 365 and I can do it right now. I don’t have them. I don’t know who’s the global admin. I don’t know who to call.

So it’s having that sort of plan in place by, okay, this is my web developer. I pay them for hosting. I pay my domain name through this person. That’s all good. My email gets hosted with Office 365 and it gets managed by Fil’s company or whoever company. My backup is managed by this company and what are you backing up?

People just assume it’s being backed up. So we’ve had clients where we had a dental clinic. They told me they were backing up. They always back up, they always change over the drives. And I said, how do you check the backups are actually working? I don’t know. We just change the drives over. They hadn’t been working for six months because the drive, but they were never taught how to check whether they’re actually successful.

Hilary Chapman: Why would, if you’re good at, making filling people’s teeth with amalgam or whatever it is you’re filling them with these days, how would you know how to do that? 

Fil Strati: Exactly. 

So ours is kind of not re-educating, but saying to them, look, this is the way to check. And they can use that.

A unique small business IT support model

They can use some of the time that they buy from us on our membership to do that as well. But we want to give them back control and transparency and say, look, if you don’t know how to do this, we can show you how to do it so that you can, rest easy knowing, okay, the backups have been working well.

I’m getting an email saying it’s working at least or some sort of a report. And then if it fails, you can get quickly in touch with us and say, Hey, it’s been failing twice in a row. Can we investigate this? Or my antivirus keeps saying, it’s about to expire. Can we investigate this? But you know what you’re looking at.

Yeah, just installing and clicking yes to anything. So people are installing other antivirus programs and paying renewals for them because they don’t know what they’re actually being protected. 

Hilary Chapman: The don’t know what they all do, right? 

Fil Strati: All these different subscriptions because they just would never explain what exactly everything is for and whether they need it or not.

Saving money through a local business IT audit

Hilary Chapman: And so you are the person who comes in and just tidies all that up. You’re the good housekeeper for that. 

Fil Strati: I do a lot of bill assessments now. Yeah. Because people just show me their itemised bill and there’s so much rubbish on there that sometimes I don’t even know what it’s for.

And we have to go back to the tech company and say – One particular client was paying about $600 for this cloud server. And we thought there was maybe some specific software on there that had not transitioned to, to be natively in the cloud. So they had to buy their own space online to use this program.

And it was 600 bucks and they had been paying for it for about four years. And then we called the tech company and they said, we don’t know what it’s for either. So then we chased the hosting company and found out that it was running a program that someone tried to implement ,like a previous business development manager or something, and it didn’t go forward.

No one told anything, nothing. 

Hilary Chapman: And they kept, so they paid for nothing for years. 

Fil Strati: Yeah. And in this particular client as well, they were paying for they bought Office 365 and they had OneDrive included – a terabyte of storage. Okay. But someone implemented Dropbox as well. And so they were paying another $350 for Dropbox for no reason when they already had a solution that was in place. Do you know what I mean? 

Hilary Chapman: Yeah. Yeah. So they had a double whammy. 

Fil Strati: That’s my job. Now I do an assessment and go, oh, wow. Like why do we have two internet connections? Or why do we have so many phones? If you’ve only got, you only need two extensions or why do we have all these domain names, but they’re not being paid to actually need them unless, so just go, you’re just asking all these questions to me.

Hilary Chapman: I feel like I’m wearing the cone of shame because I may have been guilty of a few of those things in the past. 

Fil Strati: It’s seeing things like, someone, someone buys a domain name and that’s all great, but they never actually pointed it back to their actual websites. It’s just a domain name, just sitting there. 

Hilary Chapman: Yeah. So it’s just sitting there doing nothing. 

Fil Strati: Then we can get back and say, okay, cool. Let’s write a list to write to your IT provider for information or get them to fix it, or let’s talk to your web host or let’s talk to your marketing person or your bookkeeper or whatever.

Yeah. But we might even find that. There’s too much access to previous staff that used to work with them. And we don’t know why, and yeah. 

Hilary Chapman: That’s the classic. I find that on websites, not taking the previous people who, they just leave people on the WordPress logins. Yeah. Oh, who’s that? Oh.. 

Fil Strati: And using the same passwords. 

Hilary Chapman: Yes. I feel like we, we are not, we’ve all been guilty. You probably haven’t, but many of us have been guilty of these things in the past. It’s just really, we are all busy running our businesses. And so it’s completely understandable that it’s not somebody’s primary focus.

And so it’s great to have somebody like you looking after those sorts of things. So we’ve just got a few more minutes here, but I just wanted ask you. Outsourcing, small businesses, we’ve got lots of services and stuff that we pay for and outsourcing can get expensive. And you have a sort of subscription model.

Techseek’s unique IT support membership model

What are the benefits that, you can provide, without going into all of your services and stuff, but, were going to say, what’s the, really, the top thing that, that makes TechSeek out. What would you say it would be?

Fil Strati: It’s our support membership.

So our support membership starts at just $160 a month. It’s very obtainable for small business owners. The other objection, we hear from small business owners as well. I really need IT support. And I’d really like to have one company that looks after me, but I just don’t use you all the time.

And our response to that is that our business model allows any hours you use to roll over if I don’t use them. So we have a 12 month expiry for every single hour you accumulate. So the good thing with that is that people don’t feel the pressure to use their hours each month with us. And then, if something goes wrong, three, four months down the track, or even you want to onboard a new staff member or add a new email address, you’ve got those hours sitting there. So there’s no impact to cash flow. 

Hilary Chapman: So you just feel relaxed about sending an email in saying, or support ticket in, can you help with this?

Fil Strati: And those remote jobs are charged for 15 minute blocks. So again, that whole hour or two hours, whatever you’re paying for, you’re going, what can you just set me up a new email? And then can you call the company can you call one of my staff members and set them up with their email and printer access and whatever it is.

How often should you replace your computer?

Hilary Chapman: Super easy. Nice. Excellent. And so just a two more quick questions. How often should you replace your computer? 

Fil Strati: I have this question a lot, so 

Hilary Chapman: I know! That’s why I asked you!

Fil Strati: My answer is “never” because if there’s nothing wrong with it, why replace it? 

Hilary Chapman: Good answer. 

Fil Strati: The only time, there’s a lot of older computers that around five years old and they have the standard type of hard drives in there. And because they’re mechanical, they deteriorate and they get slower. And we have a process where we take away the computer and we clone it for two hours, about two or three hours, we clone it to a new solid state drive. And it just brings life back to a computer that’s five years old.

So if you’re an accounting firm and you’ve got 10 computers, you don’t want to spend $1,000, $1,500 and buy $10 to $15 grand to buy all these computers again, when I can just put solid state drives in all of you. So yeah that’s a great option. 

But the only other reason you need to upgrade is just maybe for compliance issues or because programs are no longer compatible.

Hilary Chapman: Because your eight year old has spilled orange juice all over it. Yeah. 

Fil Strati: Yeah. but it’s more just for example, like we have a dental clinic that if they upgrade, they have to upgrade their dental practice software. Cause it won’t work on Windows 10. So there’s a lot more planning. Like we, we had a client that she wants to go to Office 365, but all the machines have Windows 7 and only 4 GB of RAM besides two of them.

But when we’ve gone and done that assessment, we’re like, don’t you can put a solid state drive, but then you’ve also got to pay money to upgrade to Windows 10. And then you’ve also got to pay money to upgrade to the new Office. It’s starting to get expensive. Let’s buy a new computer. So it’s case by case.

And it’s depending on what they want to use, but unfortunately with Office 365, you need to have Windows 10 now, and you need to have Office 365. I think they’ve only got support for Office 2016. Office 2013 have started to stop as well. If you have the latest operating system, you are entitled to get the latest updates.

So from a security side of things, in terms of patches and bug fixes and vulnerabilities, that’s… Depending on your industry, that might be important to you as well. 

Hilary Chapman: Yeah. Yeah. Cool. I always dread getting a new computer just because of all the switch over, but, with that sort of cloning thing that just makes life so much better.

Fil Strati: That’s the other thing too. You can’t really clone from an old computer to a new one, a lot of sound and display and network can cause issue. But certainly if you’re going to just put that solid state driver, you can… 

Hilary Chapman: But then you can do it. Yeah. Because I got a new desktop. I went desktop. So I went, I’m not going anywhere. I might as well get a desktop, but I really wanted a decent graphics card because of all the video stuff. And but I must admit, I thought long and hard before I did it. Just because of the effort involved in the switch. 

Fil Strati: Some customers, they, before they speak to us, they go to pay a lot of money for a computer, hoping that if they pay $3,000, they’re going to get a really good product. But at the end of the day, they may not even need a graphics card. They’re a bookkeeper or they’re doing like, for me, I don’t need a graphics card. So I I’m spending all this money, getting all these bells and whistles for something that, I should have spent that money to get a bigger screen or a better keyboard or something.

Hilary Chapman: So you can spend it where you need to spend it, where it’s best spent. Yeah. I’m going to go for those one of those big curved ones. I saw somebody with one there. The other, I was like, oh, that’s shiny object syndrome, unfortunately. But yeah, I think I’m not going to get one. 

Fil Strati: We’ve been doing a lot with customers that want that to buy laptops and want to have multiple screens. So we’ve been showing them you can buy universal docks and have your two, three screens connected on. It’s very popular. 

Hilary Chapman: Yeah, I bet. I’ve got my travel screen now, which is my travel second screen, which is magic. Excellent. And just so just one last, very quick question. Before we finish up, which is desktop or laptop?

Fil Strati: I use a desktop, so I like my big screens. Yes, no, I’m not going to say yes to laptop. 

Hilary Chapman: I used to be a laptop all the way. And now I’m desktop and phone. 

Fil Strati: So I’ve got enough back problems to want to… yeah, exactly. Exactly. People go and buy a laptop and then they hook up all the screens and yeah, unless you take it away and go home with it, then I get it. But other than that… 

I have a laptop at home that I pull out occasionally. That’s why don’t want to take something up and down all the time. So my PC’s at the office and there’s a laptop if there’s something urgent, but I do a lot of stuff on my phone, which is probably bad for my neck also, but yeah, desktop all the way.

Why you should get a custom built computer

And we can, the other thing I wanted to mention as well is the reason we talk about custom built PCs versus a brand name is that if something dies in this, I can quickly go and switch it over. I don’t have to send it. If I bought a DELL an IBM or an Acer, whatever PC and the power supply die, I can’t go to a supplier and pick that up and have you back up online in the two hours. I have to send it off, log it, log a return of authority and all that sort of stuff. And it’s a two week wait. So I always say to people, if you can’t afford to be down, build yourself a PC because I’ll swap it over, I’ll buy it on your behalf and then I’ll get a credit when it comes back from warranty.

Hilary Chapman: Oh neat. Oh, that’s great to know. I didn’t know that’ll be in next five years when I get my next one. I’ll certainly do that. Cause I won’t be replacing mine now. Of course. Nope! 

How to get in touch with Techseek

So thank you Fil. So if people want to get in touch with you, you’ve been an absolute wealth of knowledge. I’ve learned a heap, so thank you.

If people want to get in touch with you, how do they do that? 

Fil Strati: You can give us a call on 13711841, or you can visit our website, which is techseek.com.au. And I guess you’ll be providing a link below anyway. 

Hilary Chapman: Yeah, absolutely. We’ll put a link below. Beautiful. 

Fil Strati: If there are any business owners in Melbourne’s inner north or west, we do offer regularly the free audit. Even if you do have tech support currently in place, and you are a bit uneasy about whether the information you’re being given is the right information. We’re happy to come and give you a second opinion. 

Hilary Chapman: And what I really like about you is, there’s you’ve seen it all or you’ve done it, there’s you can go and confess up all the silly things you’ve done and not feel too bad about it.

Because I have done a few silly things and it’s just oh, that’s okay. We’ll fix that for you. No problem. 

Fil Strati: You and me! Now I’ve been doing it too many years. 

Hilary Chapman: Awesome. Thanks Fil! 

Fil Strati: No worries. Bye.