Good work deserves to be seen.

1. 1
   Friday night

   A table of trade mates, and the same story on repeat.

   Pint in hand, a plumber, a sparky, a roofer and a landscaper, all moaning about the same thing. Websites. One had paid two grand for a site that never brought in a single call. Another got “sorted” by a mate’s nephew on a free drag-and-drop site nobody’s touched since. A third gave up before he’d even started, buried under talk of keywords and funnels.

2. 2
   The bit that stuck

   None of them would ever treat a customer like that.

   You don’t fit a boiler and vanish the second it plays up. You don’t lay a patio, bank the cheque and never look at it again. You turn up, you sort it. That’s the job. So why does everyone let web people get away with the opposite?

3. 3
   13+ years in digital

   I’d already spent a career solving this, just never for trades.

   Not on the tools. Behind a screen, running ecommerce and paid media for other people’s businesses, most recently helping scale a multi-brand group’s online sales from £35m to £70m, managing £4m+ a year in ad spend. I’ve also built something of my own from nothing: co-founded a Shopify brand during lockdown, bootstrapped it to £250k in year one, shipped to customers in 45 countries. I know what it takes on both sides. The big machine, and the one-person operation with no safety net.

4. 4
   Right now

   I still run the digital side of one of Essex’s biggest independent builders’ merchants.

   Which means every working day I’m watching how trade customers actually behave: what makes them ring, what makes them scroll straight past, what they’re typing into their phone at half seven when the boiler’s packed in. That’s not theory. It goes straight into every site I build.

5. 5
   The gap

   A website isn’t something you build once.

   Google changes. Competitors change. What people search for changes. A site built in January and left alone is already slipping by March. Most trade websites out there aren’t bad. They’re just abandoned.

6. 6
   Built By Tel

   So I built something different.

   Every site is properly custom: built around your trade, your area, your customers. No drag-and-drop, no corners cut. Then I keep looking after it: hosting, backups, updates, your Google listing set up and posting, and a monthly report so you can see the calls and enquiries it brings in. No agency, no account managers, no jargon. Just me, your website, and a number you can actually ring.

Born over a cold pint with people I respect, because they deserved a damn sight better than what they were getting.