A one-van trades business run off a spreadsheet / The problem
Your whole business lives in one spreadsheet
Every customer, every price, every round day sits in one workbook you open on a phone in the van. You know roughly what comes in. You do not know which gardens pay for themselves, who is quietly underpriced, or what next March looks like. So you say yes to everything and work Saturdays to cover the gap.
A one-van trades business run off a spreadsheet / What we found
The wall was eight customers away
Rebuilt from the actual hours rather than the headline, the round came out 83 per cent full. Roughly eight more gardens and one pair of hands runs out of daylight, somewhere around £5,342 a month. The ten-grand-a-month goal was never a marketing problem, it was arithmetic. And more than a quarter of all the revenue ever sold had already churned back out again.
A one-van trades business run off a spreadsheet / What we built
A business you can interrogate, not just read
The spreadsheet became something you sign into. Click any figure and it opens up and tells you what it is made of, right down to the failed Direct Debit sitting behind it. Whoever is out on the round gets their own day view, tick targets big enough for wet hands, and photographs a receipt that lands for approval and goes out with that week's wages. Where the data is thin, the screen says so instead of flattering you.
A one-van trades business run off a spreadsheet / What changed
The ceiling stopped being an opinion
The wall is still there. What changed is that it now has a date on it, March 2027, and a number underneath it. Hire, reprice, or lean harder into project work: all of those used to be gut calls made in a van, and are now arguments with figures attached and caveats stated. Direct Debit collection is built and waiting on one API token to switch on.
£5,342The monthly point at which one pair of hands runs out of daylight. It did not appear anywhere in the spreadsheet the business was being run from.
A one-van trades business run off a spreadsheet / Whose it was
A one-gardener round, 39 customers, one van
A garden maintenance subscription business in the north of England: 39 customers, £4,413 a month, one owner and one employee. Phase 1 is live and in daily use, in its own brand colours. The capacity ceiling rests on only 19 of 39 visits having a real time logged, and the app labels it that way rather than hiding it. Phase 2, the part that answers enquiries without the owner coming off a ladder, is quoted and not yet built.
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All fourteen stories · MAX.AI · 2026