Most Main Street businesses are better than they look.

The trucks are clean and the crews turn up. Customers have been coming back for fifteen years and they send their neighbours. Then somebody looks you up and finds a page that hasn’t changed since 2011: three photos and a phone number.

That gap costs you money that never shows up on an invoice. The job goes to the competitor who looked more serious. A good hire checks you out before applying and decides not to bother. Your supplier prices you like a small operator, because on paper that is what you look like.

A business nobody outside can see is a hard business to put a number on. Whatever you eventually want out of this one, that number gets settled long before you go looking for it.

We spend half an hour talking about the business. You get a price and a delivery date before any work starts, and neither one moves after that. We do not bill by the hour, and the number at the end is the number you agreed to. You see the work while it is in progress, so we are not disappearing for a month. On the day it ships, the code, the domain and every account are yours.

We are a small team with nobody in between. The people you talk to are the ones doing the work, and you can reach us directly the whole way through.

I’m Alex Hines. I have started businesses since I was 18 and sold two. Now I run Clef, helping Main Street buy and sell, so I spend most of my week sitting across from owners, talking about what their business is worth and what happens to it next.

I have run the payroll, chased the invoice, and lost a job to someone who looked better on paper, so I am not guessing at what your week looks like. We take on a small number of these, because we like them and because they matter.