Our founders, Colin and Brenda, came up with the idea of offering laser targeted marketing to small cleaning companies on a budget after being in the cleaning industry themselves.
The couple started their own domestic cleaning agency many moons ago. Their first problems were the cost and effectiveness of purchased marketing. They did not want to see their hard earned money go down the drain in a bottomless pit where ROI was out of the question.
At the time the conventional marketing methods for any small business just starting out were printed ads in the Yellow Pages, the classifieds section in a local newspaper and leaflets put through doors. If you wanted to get calls from the Yellow Pages, you had to take out a bigger ad, so your business name and number catches the attention of potential customers. Easier said than done, because big ads in the YP were very expensive. Leaflets did not give the immediate stream of calls a new business needs. That leaves you with local classifieds.
That was the year 1999. The internet was becoming a thing. And this is how everything happened.
Colin had this vision for the future, where the entire marketing of their cleaning firm will be done exclusively online. Search engines were getting smarter and more often used by customers to find products and services. He just added two and two – if you are at the top of the search results, people will call you. Simple as that. But how do you get at the #1 spot in Yahoo, Altavista (I am sorry millennials, you just have to google it) and the rest of the early search engines and directories?
Colin and Brenda had a plan. They bought a domain and created a simple website. Then they decided to invest £200 in Search Engine Optimisation services, offered by a company in Manchester. Colin was going to reverse-engineer what the company did and try and replicate it across all pages (the payment was getting you only a limited amount of optimisation work).
The plan was a success.
While the optimisations (which Colin was able to successfully reverse-engineer and replicate) were delivering results only for a limited time and stopped being effective soon after, they had already sparked the fire in Colin’s mind. He wanted to learn new techniques how to rank their website in the search engines. He knew people would do business on the internet one day and he wanted to push their business’ exposure online.
OK, scratch that. It would have been great to have thought that all business will become online, but the reality was all other methods of local advertising were way too expensive for Colin and Brenda. They had no choice but do “free” internet marketing where the only cost paid was their time spent learning.
Not surprisingly within a couple years of constant grinding, their website hit the #1 spot in all popular search engines. Google was picking up speed becoming more and more popular, and in 2002 Colin’s marketing efforts were delivering great results across a number of lucrative local cleaning terms. The phone was ringing non-stop, new employees were added to the team, the cleaning operation expanded to new areas. Little by little Colin and Brenda’s house cleaners were servicing client’s properties across all London areas and postcodes. They had commercial clients. Things were looking good.
Fast forward almost 20 years and you can see Colin (with the help of his trusty Brenda) still does what he does best – reverse-engineering search engines, social media websites, competitors and delivering ringing phones. The only difference is now they are doing it for other cleaning companies in London. But most of all they focus on the area where they first started as an owner operator domestic cleaning agency – Putney SW15.
Yes, it all started in Putney and as they say, the rest is history.