Who's actually
doing this.
No account managers, no offshore team, no ten people in a room in Shoreditch. One person who got interested in why good local businesses stay small.
(SISCO SOLUTIONS — LONDON & KENT)How I got here.
(01 — THE SHORT VERSION)Drawings first
I came into this from design and technical drawing — CAD, 3D visualisation, the sort of work where a few millimetres wrong on paper becomes a genuinely expensive problem on site. It meant spending a lot of time around builders, contractors and the trades who work alongside them.
The pattern
The same thing kept turning up. People who were exceptional at the actual work, and completely invisible everywhere else. A beautiful extension with no photographs of it anywhere. Twenty years of happy customers and nine reviews. A phone ringing out because the only person who'd answer it was up a ladder.
The first one
I built a site for a building contractor working across Beckenham, Bexleyheath and out into Kent. Not because I had ambitions of being a web designer — because it was obviously the thing standing between them and more of the work they were already good at.
Sisco
Now it's the whole job. Audit first, so we both know what's actually broken rather than what's easiest to sell. Then fix the parts worth fixing, and say so plainly when something isn't.
The gap is almost never ambition. It's that nobody has ever shown them the number.
What I'm actually trying to do.
(02 — THE VISION)There's an industry built on renting local businesses their own customers. Lead platforms sell the same enquiry to four trades at once and charge each of them for it. Directory sites rank for your town, capture the person searching for you, and sell you back the introduction. It works, in the sense that it produces jobs. It also means a business can run for a decade and own nothing — no audience, no listings that belong to it, no way of reaching last year's customers.
What I want to build for people is the opposite of that: an enquiry pipeline they own outright. Their own site, ranking for their own patch. Their own reviews, accumulating month after month. Their own list of past customers they can actually contact. Assets that keep working if I disappear tomorrow, and that get more valuable every year instead of costing more every year.
That's also why every engagement starts with an audit rather than a proposal. I'd rather spend a week finding out that your follow-up is the problem and your website is fine, and tell you that, than sell you a rebuild you didn't need. It's a worse business model in the short term. It's the only one I'd want to be on the other side of.