Latest Interviews
JJ Heath-Caldwell – ‘How To Set Up A Site (And Keep It Going)’
Posted: Wednesday 3rd Sep 2008
As the property market crashes, burns, explodes, falls to bits and goes to its room for a bit of a cry, it’s important to remember that it is still there and there is still money to be made out of it, if you know how.
JJ Heath-Caldwell, of LocalSurveyorsDirect.co.uk, is a case in point. It lets users directly access (rather unsurprisingly) local surveyors but has branched out into providing related services. The site cost a quid to set up, is still making lots of money and proves there’s still (some) life in the market.
But of course, JJ must introduce himself at this point. “Goodness! You’ve got me there… Brought up in New Zealand, have a degree in Physics, came over to the UK in 1980 on a one year working holiday… Still on that holiday – I keep extending it by a year. It’s been 28 years now, I think. And my first job was working for a company called Marconi Radar as an electronics engineer, and then I went on to another company as a sales engineer, then a number of other companies, and then five years ago I started working for myself as a sales and marketing consultant.
“And that lead me into a number of things, one of which was helping out a friend of mine with a surveying company, and that lead me on to founding the site.”
Indeed, but why abandon the land of the kiwi for this windswept island? “A number of reasons. Firstly, all of my ancestors came from the UK, and both my parents were British. It’s also a common thing in New Zealand to leave after your education and go overseas for a year or two years. A little bit like how the Victorians used to go on grand expeditions on the continent. The Grand Tour… That’s what it was called.
Ah yes, that tradition whereby rich youths would slough across Italy and Greece, stealing classical artefacts and fathering illegitimates en route. How could we forget?
“Of course, you can’t go on the Grand Tour in Europe these days as you can go to France and back in a day for lunch if you want to. But for New Zealand, it’s still a long way. We tend to come over and stay for a year.”
Along with the Australians who dominated the London barman job-in-a-pub scene, until they were recently killed and eaten by hordes of superior Polish bar staff But I digress. Why did you decide to set up your site?
“It started with a phone call from a customer who was looking for a building survey. And I was at the time helping out a friend with his surveying company. The customer said he didn’t want to place an order with a third party company that would then pass it on to someone else. He said he’d wasted an entire afternoon with the Yellow Pages trying to find a surveyor but he couldn’t make direct contact because they were usually off the main list.
“So he said ‘what I need, JJ, is a site where I just go straight onto it, I don’t actually have to set up any passwords, I can immediately put in my property details, and it immediately gives me half a dozen estimates’. This would come with their contact details so he could contact them and they could contact him, and he went on to say that the advance would be that he’d be making direct contact with them, that would be the best line of communication.
“And because they would be local, they would be more familiar with the property and also more likely to do a better price, and because there’s not a middleman that price would be lower. And he said that if there was a web site out there that did this, he’d use it.”
JJ was of course more than willing to provide just such a site. “The first thing I did was chat with some friends of mine. Prior to that, I started to get a good feel for what the Internet was capable of, partly due to me setting up a little family history site as an experiment. Anyway, I set up a few web sites for some other companies and so I had an idea for what I could and couldn’t do. So I said to my colleagues that this was something we could do on the Internet.
“We decided to set up a company, and we needed a software person so I brought in a fourth colleague to program the site. And then we set the whole thing up at very little cost. Obviously, we also wrote a business plan as to what we were going to do. But since we weren’t going for any venture capital funding, we were able to do the thing quite quickly.”
Yet despite property values going the way of all flesh right now, JJ’s site is still doing well. The secret lies in diversifying, but still staying true to your speciality.
“The site’s building surveys section has seen an astronomical downturn. The number of leads generated is now down by about 65%, so if you think that there’s that much less people who are interested in the possibility of buying a house, that gives you a pretty realistic picture of what is happening.
“Now if we had stayed from the beginning with building surveys only, we would probably be in difficulties. But what happened was we got the building survey up and running relatively quickly, so we started doing other things like structural engineering, architects, electricians… Also a lot of the other things surveyors do, like boundary disputes and planning permission applications, expert witness work and all sorts of things like that.
“So there’s been a huge downturn in the property market – but we were growing at such a fast rate that the net result is that we’re still growing. Just not at such a fast rate, obviously.”
JJ remains sanguine about his site’s future prospects, though. “Either it’s going to end up doing incredibly well or all of a sudden, we will be history. The thing with the Internet is that you can’t actually predict the future – things can change very quickly.
“At the moment, everything looks promising and certainly, in my opinion, we’re the most active web site for building surveys, and we’re also relatively active for a lot of the other things we’ve got, like architects, electricians and so forth. The question is how it is all going to pan out. It’s whether there will only be one web site everyone uses for surveying or if there is going to be several. That’s an open question.”
Still, whether LocalSurveyorsDirect.co.uk ends up as a ‘how-to-do-well’ or a cautionary tale, JJ thinks there are still lessons to be learned via his site and its ongoing adventures. (If web sites can have adventures. They might. You never know.)
“There are several things. First of all, you really need to be involved in various businesses where you can see how things operate. You need an interest in what other people do – what’s worked for them and what hasn’t. If you have a job as a salesman like I did, that took me to all sorts of places where I met lots of people. It’s a case of learning from other people and seeing what works and what doesn’t.
“Then you need to embark on setting up your own company where you probably will make mistakes – some of the things I’ve done earlier haven’t come together as well as I would have hoped. So by the time I got to this opportunity, everything went perfectly well. I wrote a business plan, I involved the right mixture of partners to actually get the whole thing together.
“We agreed the plan and then we implemented it. And as it was, it pretty much worked from month two. It was amazing – you write the plan and don’t expect it to work, but it does – and in this case, everything went to plan.”
Suffice to say, there’s a bit of luck involved too. But the trick, as JJ shows, is to make your own.