Starting a Business, Running an IT Service Company, and More Insights From One of Greenlight Computers Founders
We recently had the opportunity to sit down with one of our company’s founders to give our clients and anyone who is interested an insight into what it is like starting a business, some of the challenges both starting a business and running one in recent years.
With access to such a wealth of knowledge and someone who has a vast amount of experience within the field of IT we thought it best to share it. You can find the video interview with John Sewell, Greenlight Computers Chief Operating Officer below, or you can read the questions and John’s responses further below.
An interview with our COO
What drove you to start Greenlight Computers?
“I’ve been in IT for a long time after a career in other industries, was building and servicing computers for major manufacturers, had a good working relationship with Gary and when we decided that we were old enough to flee the nest, if you like, then we started Greenlight Computers. As an IT service business, we wanted to do something that gave customers a service that we weren’t getting, we were getting service that was very corporate. You’d get an engineer turn up, fix your computer, go away, come back another day and you’d get a different engineer. We wanted a personal service that sorted that out which is why we designed the service model Greenlight Computers has got.”
Did you find starting your own business was difficult?
“It was interesting, and the difficult things were things that we didn’t think were going to be difficult. It was the things that, when you’ve come from a corporate background, a lot of things come to you on a plate. First time we had to raise an invoice, neither of us know how to raise an invoice and that’s a core of your business – being able to charge people so you get paid, but we didn’t know how to raise an invoice, yet we know how to do multi-million pound deals. So it was the small stuff that we found difficult, that we’ve had to learn how to do.”
What would you recommend for anyone starting their own business?
“It’s absolutely vital that you do the small things because you can get carried away with the big idea and the big vision as to what you want to do with the company but actually, what you need to do is you need to say “How am I going to take this forward on a day by day basis? What do I need to do to get that started?” For us it was things like making sure that we got the right staff, when we started Greenlight Computers. Gary and I employed technical people to deliver the service. We had to make sure that we got the right people, and we were finding the right people, that we were finding the right suppliers, and we could understand the products that they’ve got, and what they were giving to our customer base. So yeah, it’s focus on those little things and don’t drop them, I mean 17 years later we still focus on the small things to make sure that we’re still giving our customers the services that they need.”
What is it like running an IT company?
“We’re not an IT company, we’re a service company. We’ve never been an IT company. We’re not driven by IT, we’re driven by service. So when we go out and talk to customers, we talk about how’s their business going? How’s their day-to-day life going? If we get into a conversation where they feel that they want some help with some IT-related matters, that’s where Greenlight can come in and help. We don’t go out and go “you must buy this latest piece of technology, you must subscribe to this latest application.” It’s about helping them to run their business.”
Do you think that Greenlight Computers provides a safe space for people who find IT quite daunting?
“I think we do, genuinely, because both Gary and I are not from a technical background, we’re from a managerial and support background. So when we go out and talk to customers, we don’t talk to them about the depths of the technology that they want because they don’t want to talk to us about that. They want to say to us “look, I’m having issues with my accounting system” or “I’m having issues with productivity, can you help us with that?” That’s the kind of thing we’ll talk about and then we’ll try and work out if there’s a solution there that can help.”
What effect did COVID have on Greenlight Computers? Did you learn anything from it?
“Yeah, I mean we reacted to COVID very quickly. We were able to close the office on the day that the government said you needed to close down and be up and running immediately the next day. That was quite a success because none of the customers then had a gap in service but what we learned over COVID is to how to operate remotely and how to operate a team that weren’t in the same building and actually, what we’ve seen since COVID is that the team have learned how to communicate with each other and have actually got a better team ethic because they’ve learned how to use tools like Teams and some of the online video solutions and the communication solutions and learned to operate as a team in that manner. They’ve brought that back and now, I think, we’re better operating as a business that has staff in remote locations. We’ve got staff on customer sites, we’ve got staff in business hubs but they’re still a core part of the team and, as a result of COVID, we’ve learned how to communicate and share and work together a lot better.”
What would you say were the most successful things that you’ve done within Greenlight Computers?
“I think, create a business that is genuinely customer-focused, that goes out and talks to each customer and approaches them as individual businesses and says “look, how are you working? And if you want help, how can we help?” I think we’ve gone from strength to strength. We’ve got customers that have been with us almost since day one. We don’t lose customers very often and we’ve got customers who’ve come back to us because, I think, they like the style of doing business with Greenlight.”
