Business case studies
All About Your House
Watch our interview with All About Your House
Bernadette Fallon and Mark Johnson have run their business, All About Your House (www.house-history.co.uk), from a miner’s granite cottage in the village of St Day for the last 23 years.
Their shared interest in local history led to the creation of a business with clients around the UK, undertaking in-depth research into a house’s history and presenting it in a format of the clients’ choice – the top of the range version being a leather-bound volume of up to 400 pages, likely to become a cherished family heirloom.
Reaching out to a new market
Bernadette says: “As well as saving us time, superfast broadband has already enabled us to launch a new product. We are now offering a new ‘desktop report’ service, where we carry out all research online, rather than visiting the local area to carry out research in person. We have so many years’ experience in this area that we know exactly where to look and so we can use our specialist expertise to navigate the various archive sources that are now available online. This means we can offer a new cost-effective alternative within our product portfolio and reach out to a new section of the market.
“We are trialling this at present for a client in Paddington, London, with great results. We have found some fantastic photos online of a 1920s Countess who lived in the house. Superfast broadband gives us wider reach and quicker access to online archives, which means we can find out things we’d never have found before the internet.”
Reducing our carbon footprint
“If the new online product accounts for a significant proportion of our revenue in future, it will mean that we can work from home in Cornwall more of the time. From a personal perspective, this will be great as we do not really like to leave our cat in a cattery. Not only will working from home avert this, it will also save us significant travel and accommodation costs and reduce our carbon footprint.”
Mark adds: “Another benefit of superfast broadband is that it does not make any difference to the speed if you have more than one user online at the same time, using multiple applications. This is terrific for us as we are typically both online throughout the day.
Opportunity for overseas trade
“We are using Skype more now and expect to be video-conferencing more with clients in future, as well as with family and friends around the world.
“Superfast broadband also opens up the opportunity of expanding the business overseas. As more and more archives and historical sources go online, there is no reason why we could not research the history of a house in California or Australia from our home in St Day.”
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