We’re almost at the end of 2024 and it’s been a great year for us at McKeown & Scullin Solutions. For our last blog of the year, we thought it would be nice to have a look back at some of the work we’ve done in 2024 and think about some of the really exciting opportunities we are working on with customers as we move into 2025.
Clowne Enterprise
For those of you that don’t know, we are based in Bolsover, Derbyshire. A number of our customers are based in the local area, and we’ve been lucky enough to build good relationships with some local businesses, helping them to develop IT solutions that have made a genuinely positive difference for the business and staff members.
One of these businesses is Clowne Enterprise. Clowne Enterprise provides business support to start-ups and growing businesses in the Bolsover area, hosting events, renting office space and providing virtual tenancies for businesses to have a dedicated business address (and indeed, we take advantage of that business address ourselves).
Given the wide range of people that use their services, Clowne Enterprise needed a system that would pull together customer details, events & attendees, conversations & agreements with businesses. Whilst you can get generic systems that deal with this sort of information, these are often not really fit for purpose, with lots of redundant parts that you often still have to pay for, even if they are never used. It goes without saying but, as Clowne Enterprise offer free services and are reliant on grant funding to keep the business running, these kinds of unnecessary costs can be what makes or breaks a business.
Instead of using a generic system, we were able to design a custom system that was tailored to exactly what Clowne Enterprise needed. By working closely with the team, we were able to design the system in a way that was user-friendly and intuitive for what they wanted, reducing costs by ensuring that we weren’t paying for any unnecessary features. The system was also set up in a way that made generating business reports really simple, which was vitally important for the business as these reports are needed for grant funding applications.
As well as all that, we were also able to use the Clowne Enterprise branding, giving them a real sense of ownership and pride in the system. Whilst it might seem a little trite, having this ownership of an IT solution can make a real difference in how you and your staff find working with an IT system.
René House
Another big piece of work we did this year was for René House. They work with public and private sector organisations and businesses to offer housing and support to vulnerable people and families. René House was one of the first organisations that we helped after starting McKeown and Scullin Solutions, and we continue to work closely with them to provide IT solutions that help the organisation work in a more efficient way.
One piece of work that was particularly helpful was on the office phone system. We did a blog covering many of the advantages of using MS Teams to organise and automate telephone systems, and many of these benefits were helpful to the team at René House.
Using Teams meant that anybody with a company-approved device could pick up calls from customers, which is a significant benefit to both the organisation (who don’t have to have someone manning a physical phone line in the office) and to customers (who are much more likely to get a quick response).
Using Teams also meant we were able to implement an Out of Hours rota, allowing staff and managers to easily see assigned rotas, request and implement changes in real-time and automatically updated linked systems when things did change.
This work made a real impact on the way that René House staff were able to work, establishing a great platform for them to also work on additional functions in the future.
Other work
As well as those two big pieces of work, we’ve had the pleasure of working with a lot of other people throughout the year. There are too many to mention individually here, but one of the projects that we are particularly proud of was helping to tighten cyber security for a local charity. As we set out in our blog series on cyber security, having strong protections in place is vital for your business, particularly as cyber criminals get more and more advanced in how they can target you. We were happy to review and highlight improvements for the charity in question, ensuring information on their staff and clients is as well protected as it can be.
Finally, we’ll mention a small piece of work we did towards the end of the year, as it leads nicely into our forward look for what we want to do next year. We were contacted by a plumber who wanted help with designing their website. Whilst this was a relatively small job compared to some of the others we’ve worked on, we know how important it is for small businesses to have a professional-looking website, and it can often be the deciding factor for customers choosing between different businesses to use. We were able to help with designing a site that the plumber was happy with, and this is something we are looking to move into more in 2025.
Moving into 2025
That moves us quite nicely into what is coming in 2025. As above, there are a few things we are looking to expand into, whilst also continuing to maintain and build on the work we’ve done and the relationships we’ve built this year.
We are definitely looking to expand the type of service we offer – we can’t go into too much detail about this at the moment but expect to see more about this early in the new year.
One area that we can talk about in a bit more detail in expanding our service to include being the single point of contact for any IT administration you need for your business. To date, we have focused more on developing solutions, which we will 100% continue. But we also want to be on hand for any ongoing IT maintenance or troubleshooting you may need for your business. Again, you can expect to see more on this offer very shortly.
Finally, we have a bunch of exciting projects we are taking forward into the new year, both with existing clients, such as René House, and with new clients. As always, we’d love to hear from you if you’d like to talk about the IT needs of your business, so please do drop us a line at info@mckeownscullin.com.
The final thing to say is Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
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