My name is Lee Chappell and I am managing director of Total Computers, a business that I started up in 1995 when I left school aged just 16. In those days the IT services industry was still in its infancy so I guess you could say that by today’s standards I was something of an entrepreneur myself.

Not long after I started my IT services company there was a boom in PCs and we found ourselves providing support services to many smaller businesses where the PC was their first ever IT purchase.  Over the years our knowledge and expertise has tracked developments in the industry from resolving customers’ PC and server issues in the ‘90s and early 2000s to managing their Cloud-based software applications as we do today.

One of the reasons I decided to get involved with AVG in its support of The Pitch is that I remember how tough it is when starting out.  I’ve seen plenty of start-ups in my time some have succeeded but more often than not they fail.  I feel strongly about giving something back to the business community, to help someone else succeed in life.  I know I and many others would have loved the kind of support and mentoring opportunities – through government schemes and small business competitions like The Pitch – that are available to start-ups today. The more help you can get, the more you can focus your energies on something more productive.

As part of its commitment to support AVG’s lead sponsorship of The Pitch 2014, Total Computers has agreed to install and maintain AVG’s prize to the competition winner of a suite of AVG CloudCare Cloud security services including AVG CloudCare AntiVirus, Content Filtering, Email Security and Online Backup.  We have also agreed to be point of contact for any issues and provide 5 free remote fixes per month over a two year period.

When we begin working with a new start-up we understand that their IT needs to be running at all times. They simply don’t have the resources or finance of a large business so it just needs to work reliably at all times. Most of our customers are other local businesses. A lot of our new business comes from companies whose existing IT supplier is more than three hours away and has been unable to provide them with timely support.  We think the local touch is important and try to get out to the customer regularly. Not to fix their systems, but to review with them what we have been doing on their behalf.  This gives them confidence that we are looking after them and have everything covered.

Since working with AVG CloudCare we have found it has allowed us to take our support to a whole new level. Only last week, we had a customer whose PC got a virus. AVG CloudCare automatically sent us an email to inform us of the situation. We rang the customer and sorted the problem out. The customer loved the fact that we had contacted them before they even knew of the problem.

Finally, we obviously hope our relationship with the winner of The Pitch will be a long lasting one and they will want us to continue as their primary IT solution provider long after the initial two year period has ended.