What happens after somebody recommends you

SGD Classy Cleans is a team of seven in Ripon who have never really advertised. Every one of their customers came from somebody else recommending them.

That is a good problem, and it still has a hole in it.

Somebody mentions Sally at the school gates. The other person gets a name, maybe a number typed into their phone, and every intention of ringing.

Then they do what everybody does, which is look the name up first. And if what comes back is nothing much, the recommendation cools on the way home. Not because they stopped trusting their friend, but because the business did not look like a business yet.

That is the specific job here. Not to find new customers from cold, because word of mouth was already doing that. To stop the ones already being sent from quietly falling out of the bottom.

The seven Facebook recommendations they had were sitting on Facebook, where somebody has to already know the page exists to read them.

They are now on the website, in full, with names. So the person who was told about Sally by one friend arrives and finds seven more people saying the same thing.

That is the whole trick with a referral business. The recommendation gets somebody to the site. What is on the site has to agree with what they were told.

They do domestic cleaning, commercial premises, Airbnb turnovers and laundry, and those are four different customers.

Somebody with a holiday let needs to know the turnover clean exists before they will consider it. An office manager is not going to assume a domestic cleaner takes commercial work. Each one is set out plainly rather than left under a single heading that says cleaning.

The laundry service has its terms on the page as well, including the free collection within three miles of Ripon and what happens beyond that. Better answered on the page than in a phone call neither side wanted to have.

This is a Starter plan site, so it is one page. That is a constraint that suits a business like this rather than limiting it. Everything a stranger needs is above the point where people stop scrolling, and the phone number is a button, not a line of text to copy out.

Almost everybody arrives on a phone, having just been told about them. Tap the number and it rings. That is the entire journey, and adding pages to it would only have got in the way.