As the pandemic progressed I thought long and hard about how we could set up a new company. The company would carry out the maintenance and repairs on the properties that we’d already built, and would be able to sell its services to the wider world. It was common knowledge that it is impossible to find a tradesman, so setting up a company that could provide all trades seemed like a cracking idea. I decided to call the company Fixability Professional Handyperson Solutions Ltd.
So we set about setting up the systems, bank accounts, VAT, hiring some people and publicising our activities. We started to trade around November 2020. You can see some of our marketing materials at the end of this piece. We did leaflet pushes, we put signs around the place, we joined the web trade organisations (like Checkatrade), we enclosed leaflets with newspapers, we had the leaflets pushed alone, we did web advertising on Facebook, I even went around leaflet pushing. None of it seemed to strike a chord or lead to a return on the time and money spent
Finding people who wanted work done was difficult. We employed 2 tradesmen at the usual rates which meant that they were quite expensive. No one would hire anyone without a quote so we had to send the tradesman out to provide the quote. The issue was that providing the quote made any job prohibitively expensive unless it was a large job. The issue with large undertakings was that it was very easy for the client to decide the job had not been completed and never pay us.
The upshot of all this was that the company failed to take off and people left. At some point, it all faded away with a whimper at about Christmas 2021.
