START-UP ADVICE

MAKE IT START UP ADVICE
ADVICE FROM 1ROOF
CREATOR HUGO SELLS
“1ROOF BEGAN AS A QUOTING MECHANISM,
A SIMPLE WAY FOR PEOPLE TO CREATE AN
ACCURATE ESTIMATE FOR WORK THEY WERE
PLAMNNING TO HAVE DONE TO THEIR HOMES”
Hugo Sells is not what you think of as
your average builder. Smart, well spoken,
educated at Manchester University and
tech savvy, he may very well be the only
builder named Hugo in its long and
distinguished history. And yet? One of
Hugo’s missions in life is to dispel once
and for all the notion that all builders are
unreliable, or workshy, or worse still crooks
who we could easily do without, if only we
had the time to stay at home and hone
our DIY skills.
Reader, I make the following 2
observations. One: DIY may possibly not
be your thing (sorry, someone had to
tell you); plumbing, sawing, hammering
and laying foundations are all things we
believe we are naturally good at, but the
reality is that home improvement is best
left to the experts. Two, your loved ones
probably wish you would stay away from
the toolbox; many of my closest friends
regard it as a minor miracle that I am able
to dress myself in the morning, let alone
put up a shelf or paint a dining room; I can
vividly recall an ex-girlfriend wisely deciding
to move out of our shared flat for a few
days, after watching me attempt to rewire
a plug. Watching Grand Designs does not
make you an artisan, sadly.
Hugo knows this better than most
because when he finished at University
he bought a small cottage in Norfolk.
Now Hugo is a smart guy who has started
and run several businesses, including
organising tours for comedians such as
James Corden and Jack Whitehall, and a
festival he set up with University friends
called “Mad Ferret”. Ok, so Hugo is also
something of a one off, you need to be
if you want to stand out and be a leader,
but when he discovered that the attic
in his new cottage contained a small
swimming pools worth of stagnant rain
water which threatened to burst through
the floorboards at any moment and
destroy his kitchen and living room, even
he was a little perturbed. So what did he
do? He asked his local builder for help,
who fixed the roof, got rid of the water,
and explained to Hugo how to prevent it
happening again.
Feeling inspired, Hugo steadily became
proficient at dealing with one structural
problem after another, until he became
a more than competent builder himself,
picking up clients via a local network of
contacts, and growing a reputable and
profitable business. But he never forgot
the help he had received, and that got him
thinking. Unlike many of his fellow builders,
Hugo was able to leverage contacts made
at University in fields such as business
management, accountancy and, most
importantly Tech. He soon realised that
he was in a unique position not only to
create a much needed support network
for the building trade, but also to promote
tradesmen in the online space. Partnering
with Max Mallows, a Shoreditch based tech
guru he had met at Manchester, Hugo
created 1ROOF.
1ROOF began as a quoting mechanism,
a simple way for people to create an
accurate estimate for work they were
planning to have done to their homes. The
resource, they reasoned, would create
peace of mind for clients and building
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