It’s a strong statement, but in 15 years of my working life, I’ve never encountered one that I thought was doing a good job at a fair price.
Why? It’s simple. They overcharge. Significantly. All the time.
In this short article, I will talk about my experience with IT procurement, what this means for businesses I work with, I’ll give a few examples I’ve had, and end with a moral of the story. I’ll put a short plug for my services at the end.
There is room for IT procurement companies to provide value to the marketplace, where they’re able to bridge the gap between what a company or an individual requires, and what that translates to in terms of procurement specifications and costs.
The simplest example is laptops. Not everyone knows their i5s from their i7s, their Corsair from their Seagate, their AMD from their nVidia. I do. I’d built computers when I was very young and long before that I had an intimate knowledge of how computers work. It was through no keen effort that this happened; I was just lucky to grow up in an age and a time where computers started to flood into schools, and education for a short while was focused on IT, Excel, Windows, everything that is still relevant today.
This gives me a significant edge when it comes to IT procurement, because it means when I need to furnish a business with tech, I can figure it out for myself, and find the best place to acquire it at the best prices.
And this is why I hate IT procurement companies. I couldn’t believe some of the prices that were being paid for some of the kit we got in different businesses. I’ll give a couple of examples.
An IT maintenance provider for a local business was quoting us £1k+ for mid-spec laptops. This is quite a markup for a mid-range Lenovo with an i5 CPU three generations behind the current stock. This computer should cost £400. I called the provider to ask exactly that; “that’s a hell of a markup” I started with. The provider didn’t exactly have a good explanation for this markup. I explained that I was going to procure the IT myself instead. They warned me against it – and that’s a fair warning for people who don’t really know IT, because you can so easily be caught out on an extremely expensive mistake. But I’m not anyone, so I sourced and procured myself and it was all good, and cost us half what they quoted.
Another IT maintenance provider for another local business quoted £200k+ for installing fibre optic in the building. This one became quite famous in that local business because of how absurd it was. Not only was internal internet speed never a problem, but to quote us the operating profit of the business to “fix” it showed a lack of understanding of our organisation. In this case, it was the exact moment I realised I had to change the local business’s IT maintenance provider ASAP.
One IT procurement company through pure cold calling managed to reach my phone and was super aggressive in trying to get us to agree business with them. This one annoyed me deeply because the sales tactics I got are predatory at best, and fraud at worst. I do sometimes entertain these calls as it would be nice to find that “exclusive pricing” that I’m always hearing but never seeing – unless by exclusive they mean higher, then I see it all the time. But the thing that annoyed me was when they asked where we get our IT. I said Amazon, and the person gave a big fake groan and said oh no that’s the most expensive. Which of course, is complete bullshit. This was obviously a tried and tested sales tactic. I challenged him straight away on it; Amazon literally has the most competitive prices for laptops on the internet, save for maybe Laptops Direct. They didn’t back up their claim, but now I was interested: I said go on then, go out and quote me for X and Y. A week later I got a docusign with the quotes. Funnily enough it was more expensive than Amazon for the same product. That was my little moment of indignation; but the threat is very real. There are far too many people I’ve worked with at businesses where were they in my position, that Amazon comment might have made them fold.
Knowing what you need is extremely important. You can make an expensive mistake in buying something far more powerful than you need, you can make an expensive arrangement with an IT procurer that rinses you, and you can make an expensive mistake in buying something that is underpowered or not right for your business. If you need to buy IT for your company, you need to know what your minimum required specs are. For the most basic requirements such as Outlook, Teams, browsing the internet, and some low spec softwares, the best advice on this particular date of publish in February 2025, you want an i5 from at least the 11th generation onwards, and you want a minimum of 16GB of RAM. For storage, it depends on the amount of data you’re working on that’s stored on an individuals computer; 1TB of NVME storage is good for people’s personal computers but for a business that usually stores most of its stuff on a server, you probably don’t need more than 250GB and you don’t need to fork out for SSD or NVME really. HDD is fine.
If you need help understanding my advice, you can either copy and paste it into an AI chatbot like Google Gemini (formerly Bard) or ChatGPT and ask it to break down what I’m saying. Or, you can get in contact with me!
Moral of the story? If you’re not careful, IT can be such a racket. People will tell you all sorts of complicated things, try to worry you with all sorts of “if you don’ts”, and many of them are using your money to engage in pet projects that they can use to sell more of those projects to other customers. Don’t get dragged into these things without a very clear understanding of what you need to do. It’s often good to get a second opinion because there’s more than one way to skin a cat and you don’t want to get this wrong.
Plug:
There’s three solutions to making sure you get good tech at a good price.
One, go out of your way to get a good opinion from someone you trust on the specs you need. Then you stick to that idea.
Two, you learn! You spend time reading what an i5 is, what MS Teams minimum specs are (disgustingly high at 16GB RAM), you figure out what a Terabyte looks like in terms of your business needs, and you source from great sites like laptopsdirect.com or even amazon.co.uk (they’re very fairly priced and customer service is nearly unmatched).
Three? You ask me! No seriously. You don’t need any recurring or previous business with me to get my time. If you’re a company based in Oxfordshire, I’m more than happy to tell you down the phone what a good computer spec is at a good price based on what you need. Of course, if your requirement is a bit more than a few computers, we can work together on something to the capacity you’re comfortable with.
I don’t upsell, oversell, overspec, overcharge, and I don’t take a commission or upcharge the IT that I procure for a business. I know what you need, I know what you need to be spending, and I know how well it will work in your business. I’m extremely driven in this field of work, I am good at it and I love getting good results.
Rolling things out can be tricky too, especially if it’s more than just a computer. I can help you understand everything in plain English, and it is my delight to do so. Please get in contact with me and lets start a conversation.
Email me at hello@blockbrown.co.uk and maybe there’s something I can do for you too.