R.W. Roge & Company on Working with Flexible IT

Hi, I'm Ron Roge. I'm the CEO of R.W. Roge & Company. We're a wealth management firm. We have ten employees here in Bohemia, New York, and we've been working with Flexible IT for about a year and a half now. We've been extremely pleased with their service. We installed an entire new computer system here. The cutover was flawless, and we've been very happy with the maintenance on the system, especially the proactive nature that Flexible has built their whole company around — to be proactive and not reactive to fixing problems.

Before working with Flexible, on a typical day I'd have three or four people walking into my office saying, you know, I can't get this working, I can't get that working, I called and they haven't responded. Our employees were getting very disgruntled with the firm and the equipment and its operations. Sometimes it would take days or weeks for somebody to be in the area to come in and fix that problem, and in the meantime the employee had to live with that minor annoyance.

Now things are running smooth. We call the help desk, those problems are generally resolved within five, ten, fifteen minutes, and we're back operating again. Truthfully, my employees don't come and complain to me about IT issues anymore.

I was spending an inordinate amount of time trying to resolve IT problems that the employees were complaining about. A firm would come in, they'd fix the problem, go away, and a week later we'd have the same problem again. This was happening over and over, and I was spending more and more of my time on IT issues rather than servicing our clients.

The fact that I now have more time on my hands to service our clients and not have to worry about IT problems — having a system that's stable, working well, and allowing our employees to do their job and service our clients — is the single biggest benefit.

In terms of costs, we had the initial cost of installing the new system, which I was very surprised — I thought the numbers were going to be much higher. The cost of computer equipment has come down over the past couple of years, so that was a pleasant surprise. In terms of maintenance, they've reduced our costs by about a third, and that's really helped us.

The money we saved with Flexible we've been able to reinvest into our website and improve the website that we have, trying to increase the number of hits the website gets on a daily basis.

The one thing I'll say about Flexible compared to our old IT firm is that they are proactive. We've been called on several occasions to say there was a problem with the server and we didn't even know it. On one or two occasions we were called and told that there were some problems with the email system and they were taking care of it. They take a very proactive approach. We're really happy with that.

The one thing I noticed in working with various people from Flexible is they all seem to like working for the company, and that speaks volumes.

For me as a business owner, I don't want to spend any time on IT service or IT problems. While I have some meetings with the folks at Flexible on development of things, I'm really not involved that much on the maintenance anymore — because there's very little, because they're so proactive. What that means to me is that I can focus on our clients, on research, on communicating with our clients, rather than running around trying to help our employees resolve IT problems.

Prior to working with Flexible, there were occasions where we actually had clients on the phone or clients in the conference room and we were experiencing problems where we weren't able to get information to them right away. After working with Flexible, we haven't run into any of those problems. Quite frankly, we've had a couple of clients comment on how quickly we're able to bring up information and get to the piece of information that we need to answer their question.

As a business owner, over the years you work with many vendors, and there's a few that you would recommend. The way I make that decision is — if I pretty much don't know they exist, they're doing a good job, and those are the folks that generally get recommendations from us to other business owners. Flexible has done that for us. It's really freed up my time. I know they exist, but it's not an issue every day. I don't hear their name being mentioned every day here, and the employees actually have the resources now just to call the help desk and get the help they need.