Private brief · August 2026
Selling businesses the proof that their people are safe to do the job.
Not training courses. Compliance evidence. The written system a firm has to produce when an inspector, an insurer or a customer's auditor asks how they know their people are competent. Most small firms have nothing. I've built it, and I'm selling it as a download and as a site visit.
The sixty second version
If you read nothing else on this page.
The law says an employer must prove its people are trained and competent to use the equipment they use. Forklifts, telehandlers, excavators, power tools, anything with a moving part. Not "we showed him once". Written, dated, signed, kept on file, reviewed.
Almost no small firm has this. They have a certificate from a course somebody went on in 2019 and nothing else. No risk assessment, no authorisation, no refresher record, no evidence the person is still safe to do it.
I've built the whole system. Eight machine qualifications with the questions, answers and assessment records, plus five sector packs covering yards, construction, stone dust, garages and safety procedures. Around 130 documents.
Sold as a ladder, not one price. £49 for a single topic, up to £349 for a whole sector, and £195 a head when I go on site and assess machine operators myself. About two thirds of the money arrives without me leaving the house.
Why they'd actually pay for it
Three reasons, in the order that gets a reply.
A customer's audit has a date on it
A small engineering firm supplies a big manufacturer. The big manufacturer demands ISO certification. The small firm has it for the factory floor but nothing for the yard outside, where the lorries and the people mix. A surveillance audit is booked for a date they already know. A major nonconformity can take them off the approved supplier list, and that's their biggest customer gone. A hypothetical fine is easy to ignore. A date in the diary isn't.
The fine is uninsurable, and the insurance doesn't work how they think
Sentencing starts at £250,000 for a serious offence by a business turning over under £2m. Range £150k to £450k. No policy pays a criminal fine, so that money comes out of the business.
And Employers' Liability insurance protects the employee, not the employer. The insurer pays the injured worker, then the policy may let them come after the business to reclaim what they paid out. Most owners have never read that clause. I'm careful never to say the policy is "void", because that isn't true and one overstatement ends the conversation.
Their sector is being inspected right now
HSE runs targeted campaigns. Stone and worktop fabricators are in one at the moment, with over a thousand inspections planned, firms already ordered to stop work, and a clear line that dry cutting has to stop. Those firms know their number is coming up. That segment is worth roughly nine times what construction is per email sent.
The price ladder
Not one product. Five, at prices from £20 to about £1,200.
One £349 product was the wrong shape, and the reason isn't really the price. £349 needs a decision, maybe a quote, maybe somebody else's approval. £49 is a card payment nobody has to ask about. That's the mechanism, and it's why unbundling matters more than discounting.
| Product | Price | What it is | |
|---|---|---|---|
| T1 | Single topic | £49 | One hazard, done completely. Abrasive wheels. Banksman. Silica dust. Manual handling. Risk assessment, toolbox talk, training record, authorisation form. |
| T2 | Any four topics | £149 | The "sort the yard out" purchase. |
| T3 | Verified certificate | £15/head £12 at 10+, £10 at 25+ | They assess in house, send me the evidence, I check it and issue a certificate with a QR code on it. Recurring, and it repeats on refresher. |
| T4 | Full sector bundle | £349 | Everything for their sector. The pack that already exists. |
| T5 | On-site assessment | £195/operator | Minimum four, so £780 a day, six is £1,170. This is the machine operator work, and it's my actual trade. |
Why the ladder rather than a discount
Revenue per thousand emails barely moves. What changes is the number of customers, which roughly triples. That matters because a customer is somebody I can sell to again, and a £49 buyer is the cheapest possible way to find out who actually has a problem. They become the list for everything above them.
Every one of the fifteen £49 products already exists as a chapter inside a pack I've finished. Abrasive wheels, banksman, silica, vibration, manual handling, working at height, excavations, vehicle lifts, and the rest. It's a packaging job and a payment link, not a build.
What it costs them, against everything else on the market
A ten-person garage or engineering shop needing abrasive wheels sorted:
| Option | Cost for 10 people | What they get |
|---|---|---|
| Free template off a big consultancy | £0 | A blank form. No content, no assessment, no certificate |
| E-learning, cheapest in the country | £120 | A video and a certificate. Nothing else |
| E-learning, typical | £246 | A video and a certificate. Nothing else |
| Train the trainer course | £354–954 | Plus two days of somebody's time |
| Mine | £49 | The complete system, unlimited staff, no time cost |
| Mine, plus 10 verified certificates | £169 | All of it, plus ten certificates a third party can actually check |
The argument that makes the cheap end irrelevant: the law wants three stages, general training then job-specific then familiarisation on the actual machine, followed by written authorisation. A £12 video covers the first one. It gives them no risk assessment, no safe system of work, no inspection regime for the wheels and no authorisation record. I'm not competing with the video. I'm selling the four things it leaves out.
Why the site visits are the machine work specifically
The paperwork side a firm can genuinely do themselves once they've got the documents. The machine operator assessment is the part where an external assessor actually matters, because a site safety officer or a principal contractor will take an outside assessment seriously and an unqualified in-house one much less so.
Worth being accurate: an external assessor isn't a legal requirement. It's a credibility requirement, and that's how I'll sell it. Pricing it per operator rather than per visit also beats a training centre on the client's own arithmetic, because there's no travel, no overnight and no lost day of production, and the assessment happens on their machine on their site, which is what the law wants anyway.
The one thing I have to get exactly right
The certificate tier is the best product on the list and the easiest to get wrong.
Issuing a certificate for £20 a head off evidence somebody else produced is the strongest recurring product on the list and the easiest one to turn into a false document. The rule is simple and I've written it into the system.
The certificate must say what actually happened. If the employer assessed their own operative and I verified the paperwork, it reads as an in-house assessment verified by PHW Services. It must never read as though I assessed the person.
And I have to actually verify, which means reading the evidence and rejecting it when it's thin. A rubber stamp for £20 is the kind of thing that turns up in a prosecution bundle after somebody's been hurt.
Everything else on this page is a marketing decision. That one isn't.
What stops people just copying it
Nothing does, and I've stopped trying. Any document can be screenshotted, printed to PDF or retyped in a minute. Anyone selling protection for documents is selling nothing. So the answer isn't to lock the file, it's to make copying pointless and to put the value somewhere it can't go.
- Price. Nobody copies a £49 item and takes on the risk of using compliance paperwork of unknown origin.
- Currency. Regulations and enforcement campaigns move. A pack copied this year is out of date next year and the copier has no idea what changed. Being current can't be pirated.
- Watermarking. Every purchase carries the buyer's name and order reference on every page. A leaked copy names whoever leaked it, and a firm caught in an inspection using another company's paperwork has a much bigger problem than £49.
- And the certificates can't be forged usefully. Anyone can print one. Nobody can create a record in my database. The QR code either resolves to a real entry or it doesn't. If it doesn't scan, it isn't ours.
A forged certificate is worse for the holder than having none at all. No certificate is a gap; a forged one is deliberate deception, and that's the difference between a fine and something a lot worse. The deterrent isn't me chasing people, it's their own exposure. Which is why the documents are really the sample, and the verification is the business.
The numbers
Modelled conservatively, and I'll explain below why I don't trust the top end.
What a year looks like
| How hard I run it | Emails/mo | Site days/mo | Digital/mo | Conservative | If it goes well |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starting up | 4,000 | 7 | £11,243 | £103,745 | £207,490 |
| Running properly | 8,000 | 12 | £22,486 | £199,714 | £399,427 |
| Diary full, rest is digital | 12,000 | 15 | £33,728 | £283,370 | £566,741 |
I'm planning on the conservative column. Watch what happens down the site-days column: it stops at 15 because that's a full diary. Past about 12,000 emails a month this stops being a services business and becomes a publisher, which is the direction I want.
My model says 0.82% of emails turn into a paid sale. The real campaign we measured converted 0.85% into a free sample. Those matching up is reassuring, because it means I haven't invented the assumptions.
But read it the other way. Asking someone for money should convert worse than offering them something free. The fact that it doesn't in my model means it's probably a bit optimistic. The number I trust least is the site visit conversion, because booking a day with a stranger off a cold email is a big step and I have no real data for it yet. The £49 end I trust considerably more, because it sits close to something we've actually observed.
How many businesses there are to sell to
I had this badly wrong and went back to the published national figures rather than my own guess.
| Measure | Number | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| All UK private sector businesses | 5,690,265 | The headline figure, mostly irrelevant |
| ...with employees | 1,400,000 | No employees means no employer duty. This is the real filter |
| Limited companies with employees | 1,200,000 | Legal to cold email, and they have a duty. The addressable universe |
| Of those, with plant, vehicles, dust or a yard | 413,580 | Where the products obviously apply |
| Construction businesses alone | 885,000 | 16% of every business in the country |
Sole traders and ordinary partnerships have to be screened out, because cold emailing them needs consent and cold emailing a limited company doesn't. That removes about 3.5 million.
My earlier working figure was 133,800, and I'd warned that the market would run out in under three years. Both were wrong. At 4,000 emails a month there's roughly nine years of work in the physical-risk firms alone and twenty-five in the full list. The size of the market is not a constraint on this business. My diary is, which is exactly why the digital side is the one that matters.
What's already built
This isn't a plan. The product exists and it's finished.
Eight machine qualifications
Telehandler, forklift, rough terrain, access platforms, 360 excavator, lorry loader, slinger signaller, abrasive wheels. Each with the theory paper, the answers, the practical assessment record and the certificate.
Five sector packs
Yards and vehicle movements, construction ground work, stone and silica dust, garages and workshops, plus the safety management procedures that sit under all of them.
The selling angles
Insurance and ISO written up separately, both client facing and internal, with clear notes on exactly what I must not claim.
A verification system
QR code on every certificate. A site's safety officer scans it and sees the qualification is real, with a second tier showing the full assessment evidence.
Around 130 documents, all carrying the logo and a scope caveat making clear the legal duty stays with the employer. The building is done. What's left is selling it.
What this doesn't touch
Worth being explicit, because it matters.
- It is not DoctoriumGP. Separate business, separate money, separate name. Nothing about it runs through the clinic.
- It doesn't touch the CQC registration or anything to do with the restoration. Different regulator, different entity, no overlap at all.
- It doesn't need you. No clinical input, no sign off, no time. This one is entirely mine.
- It runs from a separate domain so the sending can't affect any of the clinic's email.
The honest risks
The things most likely to go wrong, written down before they do.
| Risk | What I'm doing about it |
|---|---|
| The visits eat the diary and it turns back into a day job | Cap of three a week. Driving 200 miles in a day is nothing to me, so geography isn't the limit, but hours are. The digital side is the business; the visits are the premium end of it. |
| The certificate tier gets treated as a rubber stamp | Covered above, and it's the risk I take most seriously. Verify properly or don't issue. |
| I need professional indemnity cover before I walk onto anyone's site | In place before the first visit, not after. Non negotiable. |
| The site visit conversion rate is a guess | Stone fabricators first, all 1,800 of them. Small enough to do properly and it tells me the real number within a fortnight. |
| Overclaiming on the insurance angle would kill the credibility | Written into the documents: never say a policy is void, because it isn't. The clawback point is true and it's frightening enough. |
| Sending too hard damages the domain | Bounce rate checked weekly. Above about 3% I slow down rather than push on. |
| Nobody buys at £49 either | Then the problem is the offer, not the price, and I'll know within a fortnight rather than a year because the stone list is small enough to test properly. |
What happens next
In order.
- Unbundle into the £49 range. Fifteen single-topic products out of content that's already written. A landing page and a payment link each. That's a week of packaging.
- Lead with abrasive wheels and banksman. Both are near universal, both are cheap to say yes to, and every yard and workshop in the country has them and almost none document them.
- Stone fabricators first for the sector packs. All 1,800, each email written for them, while the inspection campaign is live.
- Count the results honestly. Replies get filed automatically, so they get counted where they're filed, not by glancing at an inbox.
- Rewrite the model on real numbers and decide whether the conservative column was right or whether I was flattering myself.
- Then the next sectors, and build the subscription once there are paying customers to build it for. That's the part that eventually has value without me in it.
Firms are legally required to prove their people are competent, most of them can't, and I've built the proof. It sells from £49 up to about £1,200, to a market of well over a million businesses I'm allowed to email. Conservatively that's £100,000 to £280,000 a year depending how hard I run it, and roughly two thirds of it arrives without me going anywhere.