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A practical summary of who you're looking to help, what to listen out for and some simple ways people can start the right conversation.
I wanted to pull together the businesses that seem the strongest fit for you, the situations worth listening out for and some useful ways people like me can recognise when an introduction to you might genuinely help somebody.
You can obviously work with smaller businesses, but what came through is that you're particularly interested in clients with enough ambition to build something properly and then keep developing it rather than treating a website as a one-off job.
Businesses that already have some momentum and now need their website, hosting, search visibility and wider digital presence to grow with them. These feel particularly suited to the longer-term relationship you're looking for.
They don't necessarily need to throw everything away and start again. You can work with existing WordPress sites, host them, manage plugins and security, improve what's already there and rebuild only where it makes sense.
This is already a strong area of experience for you, including wellness businesses and Pilates. Websites can also include practical functions such as bookings, making them part of how the business actually operates.
Somebody might already be paying for SEO, ads, hosting or social media but getting disappointing results. That's a useful trigger because the real issue may sit underneath all of those things in the website itself.
The thing that probably said the most about the business came right at the end. You described the aim as providing a five-star level of service rather than trying to collect hundreds of clients.
That's backed by your experience in a previous business, where customers included organisations such as the Ritz, Marriott Hotels, Tesco and Tarmac, with the same standard of service applied regardless of who the customer was.
The current business is family-run too, and your description of the ideal client was somebody who will work with you, grow with you and become part of that longer-term relationship.
The strongest introducers are likely to be people who hear about growth, poor marketing results, website frustrations or changing business requirements before anybody starts searching for a new digital supplier.
They're often involved when a business is growing, changing direction or trying to work out why its current marketing isn't producing enough return.
Marketers can encounter clients where the campaign is sound but the website underneath it is weak, dated, difficult to use or simply isn't converting the traffic.
You already work heavily in this sector, from wellness businesses to Pilates, and your networking puts you around more people who are building businesses in the same space.
A particularly natural relationship where somebody handles another part of the digital journey but needs a trusted person for an existing WordPress site, hosting or a more substantial website project.
We don't necessarily need to ask whether somebody wants “a new website”. These sorts of conversations seem much more likely to uncover the underlying problems where Dave and the team could be useful.
One of the most useful things about the conversation was that you don't present yourself as the technical person in the room. In fact, you said pretty clearly that if somebody explains the technical side in a way you can't understand, you don't buy it.
That has become part of how you explain websites, SEO and digital marketing to customers. Strip away the jargon, explain what somebody is actually paying for, why it matters and what needs to happen first. That's a very easy thing for somebody in BNI to remember and repeat.
There's also a strong commercial mindset behind it. You've run businesses before, so the conversation isn't simply about websites looking good or ticking a marketing box. You keep coming back to investment, return, customer service and not spending money on something until the foundations underneath it are working properly.
The biggest shift for me is that I don't need to listen only for somebody saying they need a website. A business frustrated with WordPress, paying for SEO without seeing enough back, struggling with its digital marketing, growing beyond an old website or simply questioning whether it's getting value from its current supplier could all be a useful conversation to introduce you into.