Fluid IT was born out of a frustration that lots of different charities and nonprofits in London were struggling to procure IT services and couldn’t find a good supplier who understood what they were trying to achieve. I wanted to try to provide the answer to that problem so I set up an IT company serving cause-related organisations firstly, and then branching out to others as well. Today, almost 20 years later, 50% of our revenue comes from registered charities and we’re proud of that.
We offer IT helpdesk services to the organisations that we serve, and we provide other managed services like backups and cyber security solutions, along with the strategic advice that helps people procure technical support services at a sensible price rather than paying over the odds for something they don’t understand.
In the very first week I hired someone who was a client of one of the charities. He had been in rehab and he came to do our admin but there wasn’t enough work for him to do so I began training him to fix computers.
Over the years, we have employed all sorts of people and helped them learn skills, both in terms of IT and technical skills and also crucial habits like timekeeping and working well with other people. It can be difficult for people in their 30s who have been out of work because of ill-health or a criminal record or because they’ve arrived in the country as a refugee. We’ve noticed that an interesting job can be a vehicle for renewing their purpose and hope.
One of the 17-year old apprentices we hired became a service desk engineer and then joined the projects team. He’s now been with us for ten years. We put him through his project management qualification at 21 where he was by far the youngest person in the room, and he stuck with it and is now head of the project team managing five engineers to design the cloud infrastructure that we use. He and his partner have two daughters and have just bought their second house.
One of my absolute favourite things about this company is the people that are here. Many of them have become close friends and one of them is godfather to my daughter. I think the word ‘family’ is often overused in the workplace but there’s something very special here.
