Case study | Online training, fully remote team

The remote team that goes straight to EPX IT

How EPX IT provides remote IT support for a fully remote team in the UK and abroad: new starters set up, email and security handled, the same engineers on every call, and every response and resolution target met.

Retrained Search: online training for recruitment businesses

Retrained Search is an online training business for recruitment firms. It teaches recruiters how to win and deliver their work on a retained basis, and it was founded in 2020 by Louise Archer, who had been delivering the same training in person until the pandemic made that impossible. Around 1600 recruiters have been through the programme and roughly 350 are enrolled at any one time. The team is about seven people and works entirely remotely, with some staff based outside the UK.

Sarah Chester-Nelson is a director. She came from a digital agency, had worked with Louise before, and joined to build the online programme. She now covers marketing, lead generation, digital innovation and the firm's infrastructure. "There's a lot to do when it's an online business."

Why the IT could not stay with a director

Before EPX IT, the IT department was Sarah. "I was the one that was manually doing a lot of the things, and it was just taking a lot of my time. If we had a new starter, I was getting the laptop ready, I was sorting out the email address, sorting out all those securities."

It did not scale, and she could see it would not. "You get to a point where it's just not feasible to be IT support for everyone, even when there's only a few people in the business."

Why Retrained Search chose EPX IT

Retrained Search started with EPX IT in March 2022, wanting the foundations right from the start. What decided it was a problem that was not EPX IT's to solve: the firm had a niche fault with its internet connection, outside the scope of anything EPX IT had been asked to do.

"Even though it didn't fit in your wheelhouse, you helped, and you still checked up, and just helped us get a system in place. For us, that service just solidified why we wanted to work with you."

What EPX IT provides: remote IT support for a fully remote team

EPX IT now does everything Sarah used to. For a team with no shared office, that means managed IT support delivered as remote IT support. New starters arrive to a laptop that is ready and an account that is set up, email and security are looked after, and every member of the team, in the UK or abroad, rings EPX IT directly when something goes wrong. Every three months a quarterly business review looks at how the IT is running and what comes next.

Four and a half years on, the thing Sarah returns to is continuity. "Every time I ring up, or someone rings me, I probably know the person, because I see the same names all the time. And I think that's really powerful. After being with you guys for five years, I still see the same names pop up."

Her sense that tickets get looked at straight away is borne out by the reporting. Across the three months to September 2026, EPX IT met 100 per cent of both its response and its resolution service levels for Retrained Search, with nothing missed. Average time to first response over the last 30 days was one minute, and first line issues were resolved in an average of 3.3 hours.

Size has never counted against them. "We're still relatively small now, but I don't feel like we're at the bottom of the pile because of that." The clearest change is one of behaviour rather than feeling, and staff outside the UK get the same support as everyone else.

"If anyone has an IT issue, they go straight to you guys now. Before, they used to tell me and I would say go to EPX. Now they just go straight to EPX."

Quarterly reviews were the part she expected to resent. "At the start I was like, why do I need this? This is another meeting in my diary." She now rates them as one of the most useful things in the relationship, and wishes her other suppliers did the same. Both businesses also run on Traction, which she says explains the fit: "this kind of makes sense now, why we fit so well."

Sarah Chester-Nelson's advice on choosing an IT support company

Her advice is to hand the IT over sooner rather than later. "We were pretty early on, but we should have done it 12 months prior. I didn't realise how much time it would save me."

"Yes, I can. Should I be doing that? No. Would my time be better spent elsewhere? Yes, 100%."

Transcript of Sarah Chester-Nelson's film