About David Hardstaff

Hello, and welcome to Expedio!  I’m David Hardstaff, and I have spent years solving a whole range of operational and technological problems in the small business sector.

I can help you if …

  • you’re struggling with inefficient and ineffective processes;
  • you’re unable to get sensible information or data out of your business systems;
  • you just want to save time (and money) by speeding up what you do;
  • you’re interested in reducing errors, and tightening up procedures;
  • you don’t understand geek-speak, and wish that someone would approach your IT from a business standpoint.

Who else do I help?

Well, so far I have worked with businesses from sole traders, up to businesses with  turnovers of tens of millions.  You’ll find that it doesn’t matter what size a business is – many of the issues faced are the same.  In fact, in my experience, the bigger the business, the more likely they are to suffer from some of the needs I’ve listed above.  Specifically, I’ve recently worked with:

  • a business needing a full data warehouse to report on collections of empty printer cartridges, ready for recycling;
  • a consultancy struggling with huge amounts of demographic data, that was spending large amounts of time on data assembly instead of analysis;
  • a charity looking to save money and maximise resources by getting better information about the users of its services;
  • a web design business looking to integrate  a new ecommerce site with the client’s existing back-office systems;
  • a number of small businesses requiring Microsoft Office automation – Access, Excel and Word (they are more powerful than you think)!

There are some more detailed summaries of these projects on my Case Studies page.

You may also like to see some feedback from clients on my Testimonials page.

How do I work?

Because every project is different, there is no fixed approach.  Sometimes I work remotely, if you can give me the necessary access to the stuff I need to work with.  Other times I work in-house, but mostly it’s a combination of the two.

If it’s a sizeable job, then a Project Plan is essential, so that we both know what we need to do and what is expected of us.  But I’m very adaptable, and used to the sound of goalposts scraping across the ground!  I know that businesses can change very quickly, and sometimes have to respond rapidly to changes of priority.

I also work with a range of contacts and associates, who can either deliver skills that I don’t possess, or can help to speed up delivery – I don’t just hit Google to find them, either.  You can be confident that I will only work with people that I know personally and, in many cases, have worked with before.  After all, it’s my reputation on the line.

Away from the office …

I am an associate school governor for our village primary school, having been a full governor for six years.  I stopped because I have recently become Chair of our Parish Council, and wanted to give my full attention to that role.  

I have also recently gone back to doing a bit of music radio presentation – this is an old hobby of mine, going back over thirty years, although it has been about ten years since I last did it regularly.  I’m one of those people who has several thousand bits of vinyl in various sets of shelves around the house, so it’s slightly disappointing that radio studios are all digital these days!

I can also get very boring on the subject of the Hardstaff family tree, and my children think I use unnecessarily long words!