A spark, a small wood, and why we stopped building websites that just sit there

Flint is the stone the South Downs are made of. It is also the thing you strike to make a spark. A holt is a small wood — an old English word that turns up all over Sussex place names, usually attached to somewhere that has been there a very long time.

We picked the name before we could fully explain it. The idea underneath was: start with one small thing that catches, and let it grow into something that looks like it was always there.

That is a nice sentence. Here is the unglamorous observation that actually started the business.

Everyone we met was running on five apps that had never been introduced

Not bad businesses. Good ones — plumbers, builders, waste firms, engineering outfits, all busy, all profitable. And every single one of them was running on a scattering of separate subscriptions.

One app for the diary. Another for quotes. A spreadsheet for materials. Something else for invoices, because the accountant asked for it. A group chat where half the actual decisions happen.

Each one costs somewhere between a takeaway and a tank of fuel per month, which is why nobody ever sits down and adds them up.

But the monthly total is not the interesting problem. We have written about the five-year cost of renting rather than owning and the numbers are worse than most people expect, so I will not repeat them here.

The interesting problem is that none of those apps has ever heard of the others.

What that actually costs you, in a normal week

You price a job in the quoting app. It is accepted, so you type the same job into the diary. It gets done, so you type it a third time into the invoicing software. Someone asks what materials went on it and you go looking in the spreadsheet, which was last saved by whoever had it open.

Then your labour rate goes up. Now you change it in the quoting app. And in the spreadsheet template. And in the invoice defaults. Or — far more likely — you change it in one, mean to do the others, and quote three jobs at last year’s price before you notice.

Nothing here is a disaster. That is exactly why it survives for years. It is a slow leak: half an hour here, a wrong figure there, and a nagging sense that the business is being run out of six different windows.

So we build the office, not just the shop window

Most web companies will build you a very good shop window. A site that looks sharp, loads quickly, does the SEO properly, and is ready for the way people search now. We do that too — it matters, and a business that cannot be found does not get to have any of the other problems.

But a shop window is the front of a building. There is meant to be an office behind it.

So we put the tools you actually work in — booking, quoting, scheduling, ordering, invoicing, customer portals — into the back of your own website. Same domain. Same login. Your data, sitting on infrastructure you own rather than rented space in someone else’s product.

The part that changes everything: they can see each other

This is the bit that is genuinely hard to appreciate until you have used it.

Because every tool sits on one set of your data, each thing we add makes the things already there better:

• The quoting tool already knows your rate card and your materials prices, because you maintain them in one place.
• The scheduler already knows what the quote said, so the job that lands in the diary is the job that was priced.
• The invoice already knows what was scheduled and what actually happened on site — the extra two hours, the parts that changed.
• Add a customer portal later and it needs no setting up at all. It already knows all three.

Five separate subscriptions can never do this. Not because they are badly made — most of them are made very well — but because your data is sitting in five different companies’ databases, and none of those companies has any reason to make the others work better.

The integrations that promise to fix it are a fourth thing to pay for, and the first thing to break.

There is a compounding effect here that surprises people: the second tool is cheaper to build than the first, and more useful, because the foundations and the data are already there. The fifth is cheaper still. It is the opposite shape to subscriptions, which get more expensive the more of them you have.

Start with one thing

Nobody should commission all of that at once, and we would talk you out of it.

Start with whatever is costing you the most time or the most money right now. Usually that is quoting, or the diary. Get that one thing working properly, on your own site, and live with it for a few months.

Then add the next thing when the next thing starts hurting. It grows the way the business grows, rather than by whatever a product roadmap decided this quarter.

If you are in the trades specifically, we have written about what that looks like week to week — the same argument with a van and a diary in it.

And when your process changes — because you take on a new type of work, or a customer wants something reported differently — we change the tool. It is not a feature request into a queue behind ten thousand other customers. It is a phone call and usually a small job.

What you have at the end of it

After a few years of subscriptions you have a folder of receipts.

After a few years of this you have something that belongs to the business. It runs on your domain, it holds your data, and it is built around how you actually work. If you ever come to sell, it does not vanish at renewal — it is part of what is being sold, along with the customer list and the vans. An asset rather than an expense.

That is what the name was getting at. A spark, then a wood. You do not plant a wood in an afternoon.

When this is the wrong answer

We would rather say this here than three meetings in.

If two apps genuinely cover it and you are happy, stay where you are. A sole trader with a diary and an invoicing app has a system that works, and replacing it with something bespoke would be spending money to solve a problem you do not have.

If you are brand new and your process is still changing every fortnight, an off-the-shelf app is the right call. You need something to run the business today, and you do not yet know your own workflow well enough for anyone to build around it. Come back when it settles.

If you want the cheapest possible option this month, it is not us, and we will tell you so on the first call rather than the third.

The businesses this suits are the ones that have outgrown the apps — where the workarounds have workarounds, where somebody is retyping the same job three times a week, and where the monthly total has quietly become a real number.

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If that sounds like where you have got to, there is a free half hour in it and no sales pitch. You can see what we have already built and shipped, and what it costs is on the site rather than behind a form.

Start with one thing. See how it grows.