Seeto (/ˈsituː/) provides business technology services to small and fast-growing companies in the United Kingdom
We say ‘we take care of tech so you can take care of business’. But for founders and leaders of startups, ‘business’ means an endless to-do list.
It means looking after your customers and your staff. It means developing your strategy, your budget and your next marketing push. It means hiring your dream team, seeking funding and developing your products. And a dozen other things that will push your company forward.
That’s what it takes to build a business. But what you don’t need to be doing is struggling with your business technology. Setting up laptops. Adding and removing email accounts. Worrying about device security.
That’s our job. We are a tight-knit, friendly team of tech experts, with decades of experience in supporting dynamic companies with the technology that allows them to thrive.
Why Seeto?
Mark Ridley, Director and Co-Founder of Seeto
The dream of a team of tech experts who could help small companies with a best-in-class tech stack goes back more than a decade, to a time when most companies were still running their own servers.
The office played a big part in company culture and staff rarely worked from home. This was the time of the corporate network, creaking file servers and deleting emails because your mailbox was full.
I first merged business tech (or IT as it was then) into my role in 2012, and immediately rejected the prevailing approach. I’d been building digital products for 15 years by this point, and I was surprised by the lack of customer-friendly solutions in traditional IT.
I set out to do something different. We put together a tech stack with tools that could scale from 10 people to 10,000 people. Our teams would be able to work in a browser and on a mobile, securely and from anywhere. And we would provide tools that people loved to use.
In the years that followed, I rolled out similar tech stacks across start-ups, scale-ups and SMEs and I found it surprising that there were no IT service companies implementing and supporting this kind of modern, user-friendly technology. This was why Laurene and I started Seeto.
I see so many inspiring small companies with great products and services who jeopardise everything by taking unnecessary risks with their technology, wasting time and resources on business admin tasks or ignoring critical compliance requirements.
It’s better to start sooner rather than later. Build tech hygiene – compliant, efficient processes – into your business culture. After all, you start brushing when you get teeth, not when you get cavities.
The goal for Seeto is to help brilliant small businesses fulfil their potential. I think we do that.
Our approach
Laurene Hamilton, Head of Technology Operations and Co-Founder of Seeto
Today, businesses are born in the cloud. It’s easy to pull out your credit card, buy a domain name, sign up with Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 and present a professional image from day one. Founding teams will often use their own devices, stick to the tools they’re already familiar with and focus on building the product.
From an innovation and entrepreneurial perspective it’s brilliant that the barriers to entry are so low. But that can also be deceptive and when the business begins to scale, reality bites. Suddenly there are a load of ‘business as usual’ tasks, like keeping HR records, running payroll, building a sales team, managing budgets, and so on.
Every one of those processes is underpinned by technology. Pretty quickly, maintaining that technology becomes a job in itself and the decisions taken early on can either increase a workload or streamline that role.
At Seeto, our goal is to relieve smaller businesses of the burden of day-to-day “IT” during these early stages and to help them establish a culture and practices that will allow them to scale faster.
Before setting up Seeto with Mark I led an amazing tech support team and the modern business tech stack we implemented really helped the business to scale. We realised that this approach could benefit all kinds of small businesses – but most IT services were focused on helping larger organisations with more traditional IT.
Our approach is to give startups business tech and support that aligns with their own dynamic, flexible methods of working.
We work closely with our clients. That allows us to be proactive, continuously improving their business technology, and getting ahead of developing issues or product changes.
Ideally, our customers are invested in their business technology but they certainly don’t need to be IT experts. Our job is to design a technology strategy to support our customer’s vision for their business – and the more open and communicative we both are, the more productive the relationship.
We work with growing businesses and know that our relationship may change over time. We recommend processes that our clients can bring in house when the time is right. At that point, we will hand over all the documentation for these processes, whether that’s onboarding, offboarding, device builds – whatever we’ve been doing for you.
That’s when we know we’ve succeeded!
Our values
Phillip Saldana-Bailey, Head of Security Operations
Our whole business concept is about taking a problem – or usually multiple problems – off our customers’ long to-do lists.
When a member of staff joins your business, we take care of it. We do the legwork so they’re ready to go on day one. When a member of staff leaves your business, we take care of it. Their accounts are closed down, their data is backed up, their laptop is returned and your corporate information is secured. When a member of staff struggles with their tech, we take care of it.
This definitely requires a service-first attitude, but also passion for seeing our customers succeed.
More specifically, we have four clearly-defined values that permeate how all of us at Seeto work.
We are fair and transparent
We ensure that no decision leads to inequality, and share the reasons for our decisions.
We do things because we should, not because we can
We keep things simple and add complexity only when necessary.
We learn, every day
There is always an opportunity to improve, and we do this by embracing every opportunity to learn from our experiences.
We communicate clearly and directly
We write things down, ask when unsure and give clear direction – to each other, to our partners and to our customers.
These values help us do our jobs. And they’re good for our customers, because they do what authentic values should do – they guide our decisions, help us to function smoothly as a team and remind us of what we stand for. They ensure that we always do what’s right for our customers.
Our customers tell us that we are part of the team and that we help them to build a great employee experience. They say we’re easy to work with and we get things done. To me, this proves that our values embody the partnership model that we live by.
2012
- In 2012 most companies were still running their own servers. Staff were office based and had old fashioned ‘IT’ that only IT pros could look after. Frustrated with typical IT and IT departments, the Seeto founders set out to revolutionise traditional IT; putting email, finance systems, HR systems and collaboration tools into the cloud. We reimagined ‘IT’ as ‘business technology’ to reflect the new customer driven focus.
March 2020
- Having rolled out similar tech stacks for a number of years across startups, scale-ups and SMEs, founder Mark was increasingly frustrated that no company in the market offered a service to support and implement best in class business technology
Present day
- Today, Seeto’s tight-knit team of tech ops managers and tech support engineers are helping startups and scale-ups to get the most from their business technology, whilst supporting growth, building excellent foundations for the future and delivering a best-in-class employee experience.
value to your business
