How these were chosen
Local businesses with a scruffy website are easy to find and mostly worth nothing — they have no money and no problem worth solving. These ten were filtered on three things at once:
- Real money. Established independents with fleets, depots, trade customers or stock. Not startups, not one-man bands, not national chains with in-house teams.
- A measurable website problem. Something you can prove in front of them in thirty seconds.
- An operation that a website alone cannot fix. This is the important one. A £1,490 website is a job. A booking system, a trade portal or a hire calendar is a project, and it is where the money is.
Eight of the ten have no working analytics at all, and five of them are still loading Google's old Universal Analytics — which stopped processing data in July 2023. They have been flying blind for three years and mostly do not know it.
That single finding is your way into any of these conversations. It costs nothing to verify, it is impossible to argue with, and it makes everything else you say credible.
The ten
tel: link on the whole homepage — a phone-first business where nobody on a mobile can tap to call. No structured data, no Open Graph.City Tool & Plant Hire
http:// serves the page without redirecting to https://.Wavertree Waste
tel: links. But no H1 on the homepage, zero lazy loading across 590 KB of sampled images, and despite "book" and "quote" language throughout there is no actual online booking — every job is a phone call.STORE4U Self Storage
.php URLs. Dead Universal Analytics, no GA4. No meta description, no structured data, no Open Graph. 683 KB of images with zero lazy loading. The page talks about availability but there is no way to check it.Mersey Vets
The evidence, side by side
Everything below was measured on the live sites on 16 August 2026. Take this table into meetings.
| Business | GA4 | Dead UA | Meta desc | H1 | Schema | Images sampled | Lazy |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bank View Hire | No | Yes | Yes | 1 | 0 | 144 KB | 0 |
| Jem Centres | No | Yes | Yes | 0 | 1 | 1,155 KB | 13 |
| City Tool & Plant | No | No | No | 0 | 0 | 1,551 KB | 0 |
| Aintree Coachline | No | No | No | 0 | 0 | placeholder | 0 |
| Seaforth Group | Yes | Yes | Yes | 1 | 3 | 1,681 KB | 40 |
| Wavertree Waste | Yes | No | Yes | 0 | 2 | 590 KB | 0 |
| STORE4U | No | Yes | No | 1 | 0 | 683 KB | 0 |
| Mersey Vets | No | No | Yes | 0 | 1 | 1,831 KB | 0 |
| LiverPrint | No | Yes | Yes | 2 | 1 | — | 0 |
| Liverpool Access | No | No | Yes | 0 | 2 | 53 KB | 1 |
"Images sampled" is the transfer size of up to fourteen images referenced in the homepage HTML, not the full page weight — so the real numbers are higher, not lower. "Dead UA" means the page still loads Google's analytics.js, which has collected nothing since July 2023.
Seven more, scanned in bulk
The ten above were researched by hand. These seven came out of a bulk scan of every independent we could find across Merseyside and Cheshire, scored automatically on how strong the opening conversation would be.
They're second tier and it's worth being straight about why. Smaller operations, smaller tickets, and mostly no obvious custom-software need — these are website and monthly-plan prospects, not £20,000 system prospects. Use them when the first ten are exhausted, or on a slow week.
| Business | What they do | The opening line | Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| Liver Laundry Equipment liverlaundryequipment.co.uk | Commercial dishwashers and laundry equipment | Dead analytics since 2023, no tap-to-call anywhere, jQuery from 2014 | 47 |
| Liverpool Self Store liverpoolselfstore.com | Self storage, indoor and outdoor | No analytics of any kind. Recurring-revenue business flying blind | 44 |
| McCallum & Tritton mccallumandtritton.co.uk | Funeral directors, 60+ years in Liverpool | Dead analytics since 2023, 1.7 MB homepage | 40 |
| David Clegg cleggfunerals.com | Independent family funeral services | No analytics at all | 38 |
| B Jenkins & Sons bjenkinsandsons.co.uk | Funeral directors, Liverpool | No analytics, no main heading on the homepage | 36 |
| Nick Brookes Group nickbrookes.co.uk | Skip hire and waste, family-run, Cheshire | No analytics at all. Same playbook as the other skip firms | 34 |
| Craven Funerals cravens-funerals.com | Funeral directors, Liverpool | No tap-to-call, no main heading | 30 |
The score measures how much their website hurts — dead analytics, page weight, missing basics, no way to get in touch. It's good at filtering a long list down fast.
What it can't see is how big the business is. Bank View Hire scores 47 on this scale, below several of the seven above — but it's still the biggest prize on the whole list, because it has 300 vehicles and £284,000 in the bank, and no scanner can read a balance sheet. Use the score to filter, use your judgement to rank.
How to price custom software
This is the part that is genuinely different from selling websites, and getting it wrong in either direction loses the deal.
| Stage | What it is | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Discovery | Two or three sessions mapping how the job actually flows today, ending in a written spec they own | £1,000 – £2,000 |
| Phase one | One workflow, done properly. Availability calendar, or the account portal, or the compliance register — never all three | £6,000 – £12,000 |
| Phase two | The rest, once phase one is earning its keep and they trust you | £8,000 – £20,000 |
| Ongoing | Hosting, support, changes, monitoring — never optional, always monthly | £300 – £600/mo |
1. Always sell discovery first. Never quote a build from a conversation. Discovery is paid, it is small enough to approve without a board meeting, and it means you quote the build knowing what you're quoting. It also filters out tyre-kickers instantly.
2. Phase it. Nobody signs £20,000 with someone they met last month. They will sign £1,500, then £9,000, then the rest.
3. The monthly fee is not negotiable and not separate. Custom software without support becomes a liability the day something breaks. Quote it as part of the build, never as an add-on they can decline.
Two things to sort before you take money
Nobody has decided who the contracting party is. If you close one of these and the client pays, that money has a tax home and that contract has a legal home. The three options are: you as a UK sole trader, a UK limited company, or Web Express in Peru invoicing directly. They have very different consequences and the sensible starting point is usually sole trader — cheap, reversible, no Companies House filings.
Andrés has this covered on his side now: we've built two advisors into the system, one for England & Wales law (contracts, UK GDPR, ICO, chasing unpaid invoices) and one for HMRC (sole trader vs limited company, VAT threshold, Self Assessment, what to set aside from every payment). Ask him to run anything through them before you sign or invoice.
Two specifics worth knowing right now, both of which apply from the very first job:
- Never put VAT on an invoice until you are registered. Charging it before registration is illegal and it is the single most common beginner mistake. The registration threshold is turnover-based over a rolling twelve months — verify the current figure before relying on it.
- Get a contract in place before starting work, with the scope, what is not included, payment milestones, and a clause saying intellectual property transfers on final payment. English law also lets you charge statutory interest on late commercial payments — but only really works when it's written down.
Find more of these yourself
The method is repeatable and takes about ten minutes per prospect.
- Pick a sector that hires, stocks or schedules something. Hire firms, merchants, storage, waste, transport, clinics, trade suppliers. Avoid restaurants, hairdressers and retail — small ticket, no software need.
- Filter for independents. "Family run", "established 19xx", "our own fleet". National chains have in-house teams and you will never get in.
- Open the site and check three things: view source and search for
gtag/js?id=G-(no match means no GA4), search foranalytics.js(a match means the dead tag), and check whether the thing they sell can actually be booked or ordered online. That third one is the whole opportunity. - Check the money at Companies House. Search the name at
find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk, open the company, go to the filing history and download the most recent accounts. Small companies do not file a profit and loss, but the balance sheet shows cash, debtors and net assets — enough to know whether they can afford you. That is exactly how the Bank View Hire figures above were obtained.
Start with Aintree Coachline. They have a placeholder website, which means they already know they need one and there is no incumbent to argue with. It is the shortest path to a first signed UK job.
Then City Tool & Plant, because the faults are so clear-cut you can demonstrate them from your phone in the doorway. Save Bank View Hire and Jem Centres until you have one finished job to point at — they are the biggest prizes and worth arriving prepared for.
Prepared by Web Express, 16 August 2026. All website measurements were taken from publicly accessible pages. Financial figures for Bank View Hire Limited come from accounts filed publicly at Companies House. Business descriptions are drawn from each company's own website. This is commercial research, not legal, financial or investment advice. All companies are named for identification only and none has any involvement in this document.