Bath plumbing and heating services firm GreenSmart Services has appointed joint founder Damian Bush as managing director as its seeks to continue its rapid growth.
After just three years in business it already has a team of nine and a turnover of almost £700,000. The company has its sights on breaking the £1 million turnover barrier and Mr Bush says its continued focus on customer service is the key to achieving it.
He and colleague Luke Fisher founded the firm during the pandemic, with the aid of financial investors and from the outset aimed to differentiate GreenSmart from the rest of its sector.
“We set out to really focus on customer service,” said Mr Bush. “We knew we had a high standard of work but to get recognised and be respected it is all about perception and looking the part.
“We teamed up with creative agency Milk & Tweed to develop a really good website, we had sign written vans and uniforms and we put a lot of energy into getting great Google reviews.”
They also invested in an online customer management system and app that brings together clients’ details, quotes, appointments, invoices and orders, as well as diaries and employee certification.
“We wanted to offer a really smooth, transparent customer journey, so when an appointment is made the customer gets an email confirmation, then a reminder two days before and on the day a text to say the engineer is on the way,” said the MD. “This kind of thing is far from commonplace in our industry.”
This novel approach has paid dividends in the form of five star Google reviews. “We think we are exceeding customers’ expectations,” said Mr Bush. “Some people can have a poor perception of the industry so they are quite often genuinely surprised that we turn up when we say we will.”
He said having spent the years since launching the company getting its process and structure right, it is now ready to scale up. “We had always planned for things to unfold in this way,” he said. “We’d like to have ten or more engineers but recruiting is a challenge.
“We put a lot of effort into recruitment because we are looking at potential engineers as a person as well as at their technical ability, maybe even more so. We are in peoples’ homes and its quite an intrusive exercise so we want to make sure the right people are representing us. We’ve probably interviewed 25 people to get three engineers so far.”
His new role will complement Mr Fisher’s focus on quality control. Mr Bush will be managing engineers’ and pursuing new business to add to the 1,300 customers on the company’s database. He said: “Around 75 per cent of our customers are private domestic and we service multiple letting agents so we have the balance right at the moment. But we do want to pursue more contracted work in the future.
“It’s an exciting time for us because we set out to create something that puts the customers at the centre of what we do and it is satisfying to see that the plan is working.”
Original investor Steve Healy, an entrepreneur who has been successful with start-up and high growth companies and taking business to exit, will remain involved with the company.
Search online for GreenSmart Services to find out more about the company and its services.
