Independent IT support for Bristol & Bath, since 2000.

Smooth IT started in 2000, at a moment when small businesses were quietly waking up to how much their IT mattered — and how expensive it was to keep getting it wrong.

The market's default answer, then and now, was the managed service contract: a fixed monthly fee, per user, whether you used the support or not. It's a model that works well for the provider. It's rarely honest with the customer.

We took a different bet. We chose to charge in minutes, at a published hourly rate, only for the help clients actually asked for. It's harder work — you have to earn every hour. But it aligns our incentives with theirs: we win when their IT runs smoothly, not when they're paying for support they don't need.

A quarter of a century later, we're still doing it the same way. Same principles. Same team, largely. Some of our clients have been with us for more than fifteen years.

Our clients range from sole traders to teams of around a hundred. The common thread isn't size or industry — it's mindset.

Smooth IT clients tend to be businesses that know what they need and want a straight answer about the cost. They're often established, with stable IT and episodic support needs. Our client list spans professional services, charities, creative agencies, retailers, manufacturers, construction and trades, education, and plenty of businesses that don't fit any neat category — the shared thread is the way they think about IT, not what they do for a living.

What we don't chase: high-churn helpdesk contracts, per-user-per-month subscription businesses, or clients who'd be better off with a full managed-service provider elsewhere. When someone genuinely needs 60+ hours of support a month, an MSP contract is probably cheaper — and we'll advise them accordingly.

Most of our clients have been with us for years, not months. That continuity matters to us — and, we think, to the clients who choose to stay. See our case studies for some of the work we're most proud of.

Smooth IT started in 2000, and this stretch of the South West (Bristol, Bath, and everywhere between) is where we've deliberately stayed. Plenty of local IT support businesses have scaled into national footprints and become something quite different in the process. We chose to stay small because being properly rooted in one part of the country has real advantages.

We know the region. We know which industrial estates suffer with dodgy leased-line providers, which office buildings have persistent Wi-Fi problems, which serviced offices run their own patchy network kit. We know the accountants and other professional-services firms around here well enough to make sensible referrals. And we can turn up in person, in a reasonable time, when a client actually needs it, whether they're in central Bristol, central Bath, or one of the towns and villages between.

We're proud to be a local business supporting other local businesses. That's the whole idea.