My first client is Imperial Real Estate Construction, a builder working across south-east London and Kent. The director was on site every day running several projects at once — which meant the one job that grows a business was the one job nobody was doing. Here's what we did.
Case study
My first client is Imperial Real Estate Construction, a builder working across south-east London and Kent. Here's what we did.
The director was doing every job in the business. He was on site daily running several projects at once, so quotes, programmes, costs and what happened next all lived in his head or in phone messages.
Project spend wasn't being logged properly. There was no time to tender packages out, and no time at all for winning new work — the one thing that decides whether the business grows.
Outwardly it showed. Live sites carried no signage, the flyers weren't built to win work, and the website wasn't doing its job.
Once the system was live I took on business development and operations. Three quotable leads came in the first month, 13 in the first quarter, and 25 within six months — all from business development I ran. Four of those became big-ticket projects.
The company now quotes like a company: headed paper, PDF by email, terms of engagement signed before work starts.
And with 200+ trades on file, every package — brickwork, plumbing, electrics — goes out to several quotes instead of one. I negotiate those, and the supplier prices too. Winning work is only half of it; what you don't overspend is the other half.
He gets a monthly snapshot without asking for it: how business development is going, what's working and what isn't, who owes money and who's late, when the next money lands, and what each site has actually cost against what it was meant to. None of that was being looked at before.
The full website and social rebuild is deliberately parked. We fixed what was cheap to fix, put banners on the sites, and put the money into winning work first. It'll get done when it's the right spend.
His clients are homeowners after loft conversions, rear extensions and side returns — people spending serious money with someone they've just met. So we built a process designed to earn that trust before the price is ever discussed.
People buy people. If you haven't got the online presence, you win on the way you treat them — and most builders haven't got the time or the patience for that. That was the gap.
Published with Imperial Real Estate Construction's permission. I don't put anyone's business on my website without asking first.
The work
Sites, systems, meetings and the finished job. Updated as the work happens.
