We look after the everyday computing for small and mid-sized businesses across the Northvale region — file backup, restore testing, and the unglamorous maintenance that keeps an ordinary Monday ordinary. There are nine of us, we have turned down growth more than once, and the person who answers your call already knows your office.
Established 2009 · nine people · sixty-one businesses on monthly care plans · a forty-mile patch we can reach in a morning.
Northvale Systems was started in 2009 by two people who had spent the previous decade working in the IT departments of larger organisations and had grown tired of watching small businesses get sold things they did not need. The idea was straightforward: charge a predictable fee, do the boring preventative work properly, and be the kind of supplier you can ring without bracing yourself.
Fourteen years later there are nine of us. We have turned down growth more than once, because the thing our clients value — that the person answering the phone already knows their office — does not survive being scaled up carelessly. Our rule of thumb is that every engineer should be able to picture the layout of every site they cover.
We are based in the Northvale business park and cover roughly a forty-mile radius, which is as far as we can reasonably drive and still promise a same-day visit. If you are outside that, we will say so honestly and, where we can, suggest somebody closer.
None of these are slogans. They are the things clients tell us, in the annual survey, actually make the difference — so we keep doing them on purpose.
Nothing is ordered, and no chargeable work is started, before you have agreed the price in writing. If a bill ever lands that you were not expecting, we withdraw it while we work out what went wrong. It is a dull promise, and it is the one clients mention most when they move to us from somewhere else.
Most of what we sell is unglamorous: watching backups run, clearing dust out of a machine before it overheats, replacing a disk that has started to complain. Done quietly and on schedule, that work stops the emergencies that everyone remembers. We would rather be the supplier nothing dramatic ever happens with.
Our proposals, reports and documentation are written for the person who runs the business, not for another engineer. Martin came from a purchasing background rather than a technical one, which is why they read the way they do. If a document of ours needs translating, we have written it badly.
There is no call centre and no ticket queue that swallows your name. When you ring, it is one of these nine, and most likely one of the six below.
Co-founded the company in 2009 after eleven years running internal systems for a regional builders' merchant. Ilona still does the initial review visit for almost every new client, because you cannot plan for a business you have not stood inside. She runs the annual recovery rehearsals and writes the documentation packs.
Sarah owns the backup schedules and the monthly reports. If a job fails overnight, hers is the first machine to hear about it. She joined in 2014 from a records-management company, which explains her enthusiasm for retention policies and her habit of asking whether you really need to keep something for seven years.
Ekene answers more calls than anybody else and has an unreasonable amount of patience with printers. He joined in 2019 from a college apprenticeship and now runs our new-starter setup, so most of the laptops arriving in client offices have been through his hands. He also runs the short training sessions for new staff.
Helen does most of the monthly maintenance visits, which means she has probably been under your desk. She keeps the hardware register up to date, manages our spares shelf, and handles office moves. Before joining in 2017 she spent six years servicing equipment for a commercial catering firm — similar work, in a warmer room.
After three years of billing by the hour, we switch to fixed monthly care plans. Clients tell us the predictability is worth more than the occasional cheaper month, and the model has barely changed since. It is also the year we hire our first employee, so that a failed backup no longer waits until one of the founders happens to look at their inbox.
We introduce browser-based shared sessions so an engineer and a client can work on the same screen without anyone driving out or installing anything. It quickly becomes how most of our support happens, and the live restore console — where you watch your own files come back in real time — grows out of it. Read more on the remote support page.
Choosing who looks after your data is a trust decision, so here are the ordinary reassurances in one place rather than buried in an engagement letter. If you want any of these in writing before you commit to anything, just ask Martin and he will send them over.
We take on an apprentice from the regional college every couple of years, and two of our current engineers came to us that way. We are not always hiring, but we are always glad to hear from careful, patient people who like the sound of how we work.
There is no formal vacancy page. Write to hello@northvale-systems.example.com, tell us a little about yourself, and Ilona will read it.
Book the free 45-minute review. We look at what you have, tell you honestly where the gaps are, and you keep the written notes whatever you decide.