Hannah Milsom, Tenant Village Manager, Beaconside Business Village, Stafford
I'm Hannah Milsom, I'm the tenant village manager here at the Beaconside Business Village. We house 60 different businesses, which range from tarot card readers, all the way up to substation builders, and everybody in between. Diverse is our middle name.
Six years this year, so I started in a turbulent time. 2020 was the year I joined, which is when the world went a little bit barmy. But yeah, credit to us, we built a business village in the height of COVID. We're still going strong, as I say, with sort of 60 businesses under our belt now.
We had an IT manager who sort of headed up the IT here, so it was in-house. The infrastructure that we'd sort of inherited from the old university was pretty tricky. There was a lot of blockers and things on the actual leased line itself.
We had a new tenant join the village known as EPX IT. And I think that's when we started to toy with the idea of "Actually, can we outsource this?" And is this something that would be a better fit, not only for our business model, but for our tenants' business model as well?
The requirements became pretty big, pretty quickly, I think, as we started to grow the sites. And I think instead of us growing the team of IT, it was better for us to outsource it economically and price-wise. It just didn't make sense to have four persons underneath us when we could have just outsourced it, and you have your team, you can run and do the legwork effectively for the site.
You knew the site because you were on site. You knew what your needs were as a tenant, but equally you knew what our needs were as a landlord.
Being proactive, instead of reactive, I think was a big one. Just as I say at the start, being more proactive rather than reactive, your guys in the background, you're constantly looking and managing our networks. So if there is a problem that arises before we, or our tenants have seen that problem, nine times out of 10 it has already been resolved, you guys have managed to sort it and shut down a potential gremlin in the system.
You guys really helped advise us on tech that we needed. So we had firewalls installed to make sure that our network was secure. That's probably not something we would have looked at, if it was an in-house.
This would be your sign to do that. Move across to a support company that live and breathe IT, they know every angle of all sorts of software. They know every angle of safety on the internet. If you take payments over the internet, these guys can help you sort it effectively, streamline that service and ensure that you and your customers are safe.
