This is the final part of a five-part series about pricing, costing, and finding your market. If you've read Parts 1-4, you know the fencing business story. You know about absorption costing, price elasticity, and the magazine placement trick. This one's different. This is about what happened next — and why it led to FindMyBuyer.
What the Franchise Owner Destroyed (And What He Couldn't)
When the cease and desist arrived, I was furious. My most profitable month. 60%+ market share. Three weeks of work booked solid. Staff happy. Business thriving.
The franchise owner killed the business because I'd added palisade fencing — a product customers were demanding. I'd offered to pay him a portion of the profits. He refused.
I lost the business. But I kept the lessons:
Know your numbers. Absorption costing. Every pound that comes in, where it goes. Which jobs make money and which don't. Which customers are actually profitable and which ones only look profitable until you add up the hours.
Price to your value, not your competitors' price. Price elasticity. The fencing business taught me that people don't buy the cheapest option — they buy the option that makes them feel clever. Sometimes that's cheap. Usually it's not.
Find where your buyers actually are. The magazine placement trick. Your ideal customers aren't everywhere. They're somewhere specific, reading something specific, worried about something specific. Find that intersection.
Present like a professional. Clean vans. Dressed well. Tools maintained. First impression matters because it tells the customer whether you're the type of person who cuts corners or the type who gets details right.
And the big one: Never let someone else control your destiny. The franchise owner proved that. He had my success in his hands and he chose to crush it because I'd dared to expand the product line without asking permission.
25 Years of Trying
After the fencing business ended, more start-ups came. Board positions. Product inventions. Some worked for a while. Most didn't.
Every failure taught me something I never forgot and would never repeat — though I came close a few times. The common thread in every single one: not understanding the customer well enough, fast enough.
I could build the product. I could price it. I could design the branding and the packaging and the pitch. But finding the right buyers — quickly — was always the bottleneck. The thing that separated the businesses that made it from the ones that ran out of cash waiting to find their market.
The Question That Wouldn't Go Away
"Where are my ideal customers, and what do I say to get their attention?"
This is the question every small business owner asks eventually. And it's specific, not general.
It's not "homeowners." It's "homeowners in this suburb who read this magazine and care about security because of that recent wave of break-ins."
It's not "people who need a carpenter." It's "homeowners with listed properties who understand craftsmanship and have the budget for it."
It's not "businesses looking for software." It's "plumbing companies with 3-8 employees in the South East who are stuck on spreadsheets and losing jobs because they're disorganised."
But working that out took me weeks of tracking, spreadsheets, conversations, testing. Multiple hypotheses. Dead ends. Pivots. Most small business owners don't have weeks. They have about two minutes between finishing a job and getting in the van. They need the answer now.
What FindMyBuyer Actually Does
It answers the question in two minutes:
Who are your ideal buyers? Detailed customer profiles based on your specific trade and location. Not generic personas. Real, specific breakdowns of the different types of people who buy what you sell, ranked by profitability and satisfaction.
Where are they? Facebook groups, LinkedIn pages, directories, forums, niche platforms — with direct links. The exact places they're spending time right now. The communities they trust. The conversations they're having.
What should you say to them? Ready-to-post content tailored to each buyer type, each day of the week. Not generic "we're a great business" messaging. Specific language that speaks to their actual fears, their actual needs, their actual decision-making process.
Everything I learned the hard way — absorption costing, buyer segmentation, platform placement, messaging — compressed into a tool that does it for you. No jargon. No marketing degree required. Just honest intelligence about where your buyers are and what they want to hear.
Why I Didn't Want Partners This Time
I'm sick of having business partners. Every time I've built something with someone else's name on it, something goes wrong.
FindMyBuyer is mine. 100%. No franchise owner to pull the plug. No board to overrule me. No investor to dilute the vision.
I'm a sole proprietor responsible for the outcome. That's terrifying and liberating in equal measure.
Everything I'm doing — every feature, every blog post, every line of code, every customer service email at midnight — feeds into this platform because I believe it solves a real problem for real people. And if it doesn't, that failure is on me.
The Lesson in All of This
That little fencing business was started in what everyone called a saturated market. Friends and family said I'd have to sell cheap to get customers. I proved them wrong.
But they were left laughing when the franchise owner took it all away. And for 25 years after that, I've been looking, searching, treading water, trying, failing — moving from one thing to the next, never quite getting it right.
Until I found something I could control 100%. Something that takes 25 years of hard-won wisdom — the mistakes, the losses, the lessons that cost real money and real energy — and puts it in the hands of people who need it most.
Every business failure teaches you something. The trick is building something that uses all the lessons at once. That's FindMyBuyer.
The Series Wrap-Up
If you've read all five parts, you now know more about profitable pricing than most business owners will learn in a decade.
The absorption costing spreadsheet. The price elasticity test. The placement strategy. The buyer intelligence. These aren't theories. They're things I've done, lost money on, and finally figured out.
FindMyBuyer exists because I wish it had existed when I was pumping £100k per month into a business that couldn't tell me where its customers came from. A business that died not because I was bad at my trade, but because I didn't understand my market.
That's the problem I'm solving. Not for me anymore. For you.