A few miles up the road
I work from home in Leyland, just west of Chorley, with the Initiate IT registered office at Strawberry Fields Digital Hub on Euxton Lane. The Hub sits in the M6 corridor between J27 and J28, where a lot of the local SMB community is concentrated, a mix of professional services, light industrial estates, technology firms, and the trades that support them.
Most client work happens remotely. Where being local actually pays off is the in-person stuff that genuinely benefits from someone in the room: a network rebuild, an office relocation, a new starter induction, a quarterly review where being on-site matters. Chorley is a 15-minute drive, which makes those visits practical without pretending the working day is built around an office I don’t actually use.
Who I work with around Chorley
Chorley sits in an unusual sweet spot. Big enough to support a meaningful SMB business community across professional services, construction, retail and light industry. Close enough to Manchester and Liverpool to get talent and clients from both. Small enough that word-of-mouth still drives a decent share of how local businesses find suppliers.
Most of my Chorley-area clients are between 5 and 50 people. A typical client is a founder-led business that’s grown past the point where ad-hoc IT works but isn’t large enough to justify an internal IT team, the gap I exist to fill.
Services available across Chorley
The full service offer applies in Chorley exactly as elsewhere: the Fractional Head of IT retainer from £650 a month for firms of 10 to 150 people, managed IT from £300 a month underneath it or on its own, independent IT consultancy for businesses that want advice or a project rather than a retainer, plus Microsoft 365 and SharePoint consultancy, hosted desktops and cloud, hosted telephony, IT security, and one-off project and strategy work. The proximity just makes the in-person things easier, the work where being able to visit the office is genuinely useful (a network rebuild, an office relocation, a new starter induction at scale) is meaningfully more practical when your office is fifteen minutes from mine.
Local context worth knowing
Chorley’s business community runs on a small number of clusters, Strawberry Fields and the wider Astley Park area for tech and professional services, Buckshaw Village for the larger employers, Botany Bay and Eaves Green for light industrial. There’s a Chorley Council Business Improvement District programme, an active Chamber, and a long-standing Lancashire LEP (now part of the combined authority) that supports SMB growth across the region.
If you’re a Chorley business looking at IT support, the chances are I either know your premises or have driven past them. Working with a local provider has obvious advantages, but it should be a tie-breaker, not the reason. The reason should be that the IT support is actually any good. That’s a separate conversation, and one I’m happy to have over a coffee at the Hub when it makes sense to meet in person.