Case Study: Empowering Pat Tomlinson's Agricultural Success

Enterprise-grade IT for a specialist rural accountancy firm

Pat Tomlinson Accountancy advises farming and rural businesses across the UK from a base in the South West [NEEDS FIGURE: staff numbers, offices, or year established]. It's specialist work, and the firm is known for delivering it with a personal, down-to-earth feel that bigger practices find difficult to replicate.

That's a good position to hold and a hard one to defend. Clients who choose a smaller firm for the relationship still expect the reliability and security of a large one, and these days they tend to ask about it directly.

Contents:

1. The Challenge
2. Our Solution
3. The Net9 Framework
4. The Result

The Challenge

Pat Tomlinson wanted to modernise on three fronts: remote working that held up under real conditions, security tight enough to stand behind when a client asks, and IT that could keep pace with far larger competitors. The constraint was that none of it could come at the cost of the personal service clients stay for.

Rural accountancy sharpens all three. Clients are often working from farms and holdings where connectivity is unreliable, so the firm has to be reachable on the client's terms rather than its own. Deadlines cluster hard around the tax year rather than spreading evenly. And the data involved is about as sensitive as data gets, held by a firm small enough that a serious security incident would be existential rather than merely expensive.

Smaller firms can't always match the IT budgets of the big players. Their clients expect the same reliability regardless.

The Solution

The partnership began with a comprehensive technical audit, which produced a Net9 alignment score and a tailored roadmap built on it. Three things came out of that plan:

• WatchGuard for network security, giving a firm of this size protection it could point to when clients ask how their financial data is being looked after
• Microsoft 365 for cloud-based working, so the team can work properly from a client's kitchen table or a farm office rather than only from a desk
• Quarterly reviews with a Virtual IT Director, so the setup keeps pace with the firm rather than ageing quietly between crises

That last point is the one that compounds. A security product and a cloud platform are a moment in time. Someone reviewing the roadmap every quarter is what stops a modernised firm becoming a dated one three years later.

The Net9 Framework

Everything we delivered for Pat Tomlinson runs through Net9, our framework for giving a business full visibility across nine key delivery areas: 

1. Business continuity protection
2. Cloud platforms
3. Scalable technology estate
4. Licensing and legal
5. Network infrastructure and wireless
6. Connectivity and collaboration
7. Threats and vulnerabilities
8. Power, environment and ESG
9. Standardised, efficient, scalable systems

Rather than fixing problems one at a time, Net9 lets us see the whole picture, and enables us to build a roadmap that keeps scaling as the business grows. To learn more about our Net9 process, click here.

The Result

Pat Tomlinson now runs on infrastructure that would not look out of place in a practice several times its size, while the personal ethos clients came for is untouched. The team works securely from wherever the client happens to be, and the firm can answer questions about data protection with something concrete rather than reassurance.

The setup is also built to keep moving. Quarterly reviews mean the roadmap is revisited while the firm changes, rather than rebuilt from scratch once it has fallen behind.

What to take from it

The assumption worth challenging here is that enterprise-grade IT is something you grow into. Pat Tomlinson didn't get there by spending like a large firm. They got there by having someone look at the whole estate once, properly, and then keep looking at it every quarter.

If your clients expect a standard of security and reliability your current setup can't evidence, we'd be glad to talk it through. Get in touch with the Netitude team and we'll take a look at where your own constraints actually sit.