> about us
31 years of keeping businesses running
Maker Technologies started in 1995 installing and supporting business management software. IT support came second, because clients kept asking the people who understood their systems to look after everything else too. A good number of those early clients are still with us, which we reckon says more than any award would.
We're based in Liverpool and work with businesses across Merseyside, Lancashire and the wider North West. The model has always been long relationships over quick sales, because advice is worth more when it comes from someone who knows your business and plans to be around next year.
// our story
Four technology waves, one job
1995
Business software first
Founded to install and support business management software. Understanding how businesses actually run (orders, stock, accounts) was the job from day one, and the Datafile partnership dates from these years.
2000s
IT came second
Clients kept asking us to look after the rest: networks, servers, email, phones. We became the outsourced IT department for a growing set of North West firms.
2010s
The move to the cloud
The decade of Microsoft 365. We moved client after client from servers in cupboards to working from anywhere, mostly before anyone called it that.
Today
The AI era
The same job with new tools. Because we know our clients' processes as well as their systems, we know where AI will actually pay, and where it won't.
// the people
Who you'll be dealing with
No account managers. No layers of handoff.
You deal with people who understand the problem, know the technology and are responsible for getting it right. Fewer crossed wires, faster decisions and no need to explain the same thing twice.
> steve
Steve Maker
Founder & Director · Business Systems & ERP
Steve has been putting business systems into companies since the late 1980s, which means he has seen most of the technology industry's great promises arrive at least once before.
Mainframes became PCs. PCs became networks. Client-server became cloud. Now AI is being presented as the next transformation. Some of these shifts genuinely changed how businesses worked. Others mostly changed the terminology. Steve's skill is knowing the difference.
That judgement comes from nearly four decades spent inside real businesses, understanding how they operate, implementing systems and then staying around long enough to see what actually happens once the sales presentation is over.
His approach has remained remarkably consistent. Start with the business, not the technology. Understand what people are trying to achieve, where the friction is and how the work really gets done. Only then decide what system belongs underneath it.
It is an unfashionably practical way of looking at technology, but it has aged rather well. The best solution is not necessarily the newest, the largest or the one with the longest feature list. It is the one that works.
Steve has always been interested in what comes next, from the early days of business computing to cryptocurrency and now AI. But the attraction has never been novelty for its own sake. It is about spotting the point at which an interesting technology becomes a useful one.
After nearly four decades in technology, Steve has seen enough revolutions to know that most arrive with more certainty than they deserve. What matters is not what is new, but what proves useful once it meets the real world.
> tim
Tim Maker
Director · Technology & AI
Tim has spent more than two decades working across the parts of business technology that are normally treated as separate disciplines.
Business software, networks, servers, Microsoft cloud services, telephony, security, web infrastructure and, increasingly, AI. The list matters less than the perspective it gives him. Businesses rarely experience technology as neat categories. Their problems tend to appear in the joins between them.
That is where Tim tends to work.
A software problem may really be a process problem. An AI project may depend on data sitting in an ERP system, documents in Microsoft 365 and calls passing through a phone platform. Automating one part without understanding the others can simply move the problem somewhere else.
Tim's approach is therefore deliberately broad. He looks at the technology a business already has, how people actually use it and where the unnecessary work has accumulated. Sometimes the answer is better infrastructure. Sometimes it is integration or automation. Increasingly, it is a carefully applied piece of AI. Quite often, it is a combination of all four.
Like Steve, he learned this through years of practical work rather than theory: installing systems, supporting users, fixing what failed and seeing first-hand the difference between technology that looks impressive and technology that makes a business better.
Tim tends to find the biggest gains in the gaps between systems: getting software, data, infrastructure and AI to work together rather than as separate pieces. That is usually where technology stops being a collection of tools and starts becoming something genuinely useful.
Why clients stay
No call centres, no account managers reading scripts, no upselling at renewal time. People phone us with a problem and someone they know fixes it. After thirty years, that's still the whole model.
Talk to someone who's seen it all since 1995
Half an hour on the phone. Tell us what's annoying you about your IT and where the hours go, and we'll tell you what we'd do about it. If we're not the right fit, we'll say so.
Book a free consultation