Window of opportunity

In its 40th year, Business Micros is paying tribute to some of the hardworking staff behind the scenes who have helped to make the business such an ongoing success. Technical services manager Bret Park is the latest member of the team to come under the spotlight.

When Bret left the RAF in 2002, and joined his cousin for a few months on his commercial window cleaning round, he probably wasn’t expecting it to lead to a career in IT, but that’s what happened. Bret was cleaning the windows on the outside of the Business Micros building in Penpont, Dumfriesshire, when he looked in and realised it was a software company. That was too good an opportunity to miss for a young IT savvy ex-serviceman, so he went inside and asked if they had any vacancies.

Within a few weeks, he had been hired to work on the technical service desk; sailing through the test he was given on his first day to assemble a computer from scratch. Over the past 17 years, Bret has never looked back and is now technical services manager, looking after an experienced and highly motivated team of eight who answer around 100 support calls a day from Business Micros customers.

Bret said: “In the early days, customers who had an issue with their software would routinely take a back-up of their system on disc and post that to Business Micros so that we could diagnose the problem and then either call the customer back to talk them through the solution or send out a replacement disc – again by post.

“At that point, Business Micros had just one server and a single dial up line, which means that everything was so much slower than it is now. Now of course, our support is on the phone or via TeamViewer direct log-in and thankfully we measure the time it takes us to resolve issues in minutes rather than days.

“IT has become a key area for fabricators in particular to maximise their competitive advantage, and Business Micros is thriving on the fact that so many customers want us to keep on advancing our software applications so that they can do more and more with them. Clearly, technical service isn’t just about supporting customers when things go wrong anymore; it’s developed much more into a partnership with them and that’s hugely rewarding.”