YouGrowIT
Manufacturing & fabrication
Your IT isn't shaped like an office. The pricing shouldn't pretend it is.
Most IT support is sold per person, which works beautifully for an accountancy where everyone has a laptop. In a fabrication shop the people and the risk sit in different places: twenty staff, nine logins, a server holding twenty years of drawings, and a job system that decides whether you can invoice on Tuesday.
What we actually look after here
The file server and the drawing archive
Twenty years of drawings on one box in the back office is the most valuable thing in the building and usually the least protected. Server care covers the host, the patching, the monitoring and the backup that actually gets tested.
The job-management system
Quoting, scheduling, invoicing. We keep what it runs on healthy and deal with the vendor on your behalf — because when the software company blames the network and the network company blames the software, that argument shouldn't be yours to referee.
Shop-floor PCs and shared terminals
Machines nobody logs out of, in a dusty room, running something specific. They're computers, so computer care covers them — and the ones that can't be touched get handled the way described below rather than ignored.
The office half
Microsoft 365, email, logins, accounts, MFA, starters and leavers. The part everyone sells. It matters, and it isn't the part that stops the floor.
What it would actually cost
Take a business with about twenty staff — 9 of them with a computer login, the rest on the floor sharing terminals — plus one server and a NAS.
The eleven floor staff cost nothing. A user is someone with a work account. If they badge onto a shared terminal and have no work email, they're not a user — the terminal is a computer, and computer care is already in Managed.
Two honest asterisks. If your setup needs work before it can be maintained properly, that's a one-off project quoted in writing first — and if you don't know what state you're in, the Health Check puts a fixed price on finding out instead of leaving you to imagine a number. And onsite attendance is charged on top; see below.
Every figure above is published on the packages page, along with what's in each tier.
The four questions we get asked, answered
Does somebody actually come out?
Yes. When the drawing PC dies, someone drives to it — a remote session doesn't hold a screwdriver. Onsite attendance is billed at the published $82.50 call-out plus time on site, on top of your package, and we tell you before we get in the car. Most things are still faster fixed remotely, and we'll say when that's the case rather than charge you for a drive.
Is the drawing server backed up?
Not by the backup included in a package — that covers Microsoft 365: email, OneDrive and SharePoint. A server, a NAS or a job-system database needs its own arrangement, and it is the single most common gap we find in a workshop. A NAS in particular is not a backup: it's one box, usually in the same room as whatever would destroy it, and RAID protects you from a dead disk, not from ransomware.
One PC can't be updated. The machine vendor forbids it.
Common, and more common than the industry admits. Telling you to replace it isn't advice, it's an invoice. What works is to fence it: restrict what it can reach, strip off everything it doesn't need, keep it off email and the web, make sure whatever it produces is backed up elsewhere, and write it down as a known risk with a date to look at it again. It stops being the quiet hole in your network and becomes a line on a list.
Our first shift starts at six. What happens at 6:15?
Straight answer: support hours are Monday to Friday, 8:30am–5:30pm. If your exposure is the early start, that's a real gap and we'd rather name it now than have you find it in the terms.
It's solvable and it's priced, not implied — Complete includes an after-hours helpdesk, Managed can take it as a bolt-on, and outside that the published after-hours rates apply. Whichever way, the limits get written down before you sign, so nobody is discovering them at 6:15 on a Tuesday.
When it stops being about support
Two things bring fabricators to us that aren't day-to-day IT.
A customer starts asking security questions. A tender, a supplier questionnaire, an insurer at renewal — often from a customer far larger than you, with a form that assumes you have an IT department. That's a programme with evidence and a deadline, and it's a different piece of work.
Staff have started pasting things into free chatbots. Drawings, customer pricing, quotes. The free tools and the business ones look identical and treat your content completely differently, and most people have no idea which one is open in the tab. What the difference actually is.
We look after Melbourne manufacturing and fabrication businesses, including one trading since the 1970s. Ring 03 9028 4358 — a person answers.