There is a view that largely bootstrapped businesses place a limit on their growth ambitions.
Tell that to Avin Rabheru MBE, who founded Housekeep in 2014 with “£5,000 and one cleaner” and has only taken £1 million of investment to date, back in 2015.
Today the business employs 60 people across development, UX, product, marketing and customer service teams, while 2,000 cleaners and tradespeople use the platform to find work.
“We’ve funded our own growth since then. We don’t have any plans for future fundraising,” he tells TechBlast.
“We’ve been profitable since year 3, so we’ve been able to fund our own growth. Our goal is to grow Housekeep into a £100m+ turnover business within the next five years.”
Angel investor
Rabheru began his career as a strategy consultant and is a prolific VC and angel investor. Now a venture partner at Seedrs, he has invested in more than 50 young, growing businesses throughout his career, and continues to be active in that space.
“I’d spent most of my career investing in young, growing businesses, often in consumer technology, and I always knew that I wanted to start my own,” he says of Housekeep’s origins. “I tried to distil what the most successful businesses I’d invested in had in common: they were usually in large, fragmented markets, where there was low investment in technology.
“So the idea for Housekeep wasn’t based on a lightbulb moment – I researched lots of industries and home services fit the bill. It’s worth £40 billion a year, is highly fragmented, and is characterised by low NPS. Plus no one had really built any technology for either side of the market.”
The tech
The tech platform matches service providers with consumers in their local area. Its technology then gives them all the tools they need to manage a recurring relationship – users can book, reschedule or skip jobs, add instructions, change their preferences or live chat to each other online or in-app.
It started out in home cleaning – helping cleaners get weekly or fortnightly customers in their local area – and then moved into tradespeople services, including plumbers, electricians and gardeners. “Now we’re looking to own the home… our mission is to deliver every job,” says Rabheru.
The plan is to launch in new towns and cities. Initially available in London, it has since expanded to the home counties and Brighton. Bristol, Cambridge, Oxford, Manchester, Birmingham, Edinburgh and Bath are coming soon.
The CEO says his role has “changed quite a bit over the years”.
“In the early days, it meant being a hands-on founder,” he explains. “As we’ve grown, I’ve had to evolve with the business and I’ve transitioned to more of the CEO role. Myself and the senior team are now working more on the business, rather than in the business. That way we’re able to build a structure and business that can solve problems on repeat.”
COVID challenge
He says the biggest challenge in building his business to date was undoubtedly COVID-19 and the subsequent lockdowns.
“In three weeks in March 2020 the demand for our core home cleaning service dropped by 80%,” he recalls. “Rather than furloughing everyone and waiting the lockdowns out, we decided to double down, building new service verticals and expanding into deep cleaning & tradespeople services.
“We got through without any redundancies and were back to 80% of peak revenue within six months. We’re now operating at record revenue, with a more-rounded business, and a much larger addressable market – £40bn vs £5bn.”
Upscale
Housekeep is among 35 companies accepted onto the eighth edition of Tech Nation’s Upscale. The six-month government-backed programme is designed to support and scale the most promising mid-stage tech companies in the UK, at a critical stage of their growth.
The companies will receive over 60 hours of support at world-class coaching sessions – delivered by over 20 expert scale coaches – attend networking events with key stakeholders, peers, corporates and investors, and have access to a range of online resources, designed to tackle fundamental scaling challenges around culture, talent, international expansion and financing.
“We’re looking forward to working with Tech Nation’s scaling coaches, who have experience with the kind of problems that Housekeep is having to solve these days,” says Rabheru. “We’re in the process of moving from a single-location, single-vertical business, to a multi-location, multi-vertical model. So we’re coming up against challenges that we haven’t had to navigate before.
“We’ve always spoken a lot with other businesses in the startup/scale-up space, so we’re also looking forward to trading war stories with the other innovative businesses that are in this Upscale cohort.”
Asked for one nugget of advice for people looking to found a tech business, he replies: “Have a thorough hiring process. Hiring the wrong person is more expensive than not hiring at all.”
Cooper Parry, Cooley and Silicon Valley Bank will be Programme Partners for this year’s Upscale programme.
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