Returning a mature care marketplace to revenue growth

The situation

Hometouch is a profitable, ten-year-old live-in care marketplace operating in a highly competitive category. Revenue had been flat for several years, despite the business having a strong reputation, genuine expertise and a service customers valued highly. It was investing in commercial activity, particularly organic search, but not getting the growth it needed.

There were challenges on both sides of the marketplace. On the customer side, the proposition, acquisition channels and journey to enquiry all needed work. On the supply side, matching a care brief to the right carer was not always fast enough, and engagement with the existing carer database was lower than it needed to be. I worked directly with the CEO on growth, positioning and acquisition, and with the COO on the marketplace and supply side.

What I did

I started by understanding where the business was genuinely strong and where the commercial journey was getting in the way. Customer research confirmed that people who used Hometouch valued the service highly, but much of what made it credible and distinctive, including the clinical background of the founder and the experience of the care team, was difficult to see before somebody enquired.

I used that work to sharpen the positioning and then looked at the customer journey end to end: how easily somebody could understand what Hometouch did, how the service worked, why they should trust it and how straightforward it was to move from research to enquiry. That led into substantial changes to the website, lead capture, sales follow-up and CRM journeys.

At the same time I worked through where sales were actually coming from and what the channel investment was delivering. Organic search was particularly important, so I reviewed the existing approach, replaced the incumbent agency and moved away from thousands of near-duplicate location pages towards much stronger editorial content built around genuine expertise. I rebuilt reporting and workflows in HubSpot and introduced better templates, automation and AI-assisted processes so a very small team could produce and distribute higher-quality work consistently.

The marketplace itself mattered just as much as acquisition. I worked with the COO on supply and demand, including the matching process and how Hometouch communicated with and re-engaged its carer base.

Then, midway through the engagement, Hometouch acquired a competitor. I supported the due diligence and led the commercial integration: clarifying how the two propositions should sit alongside one another, avoiding unnecessary competition between the brands, rebuilding the acquired business’s paid acquisition and tracking, and bringing in the capability to run it properly.

More demand wasn't enough. The customer journey and the marketplace had to work better together.

The result

Hometouch returned to more than 10% year-on-year revenue growth. In an initial search test, five previously declining pages were rewritten and the strongest delivered up to four times their previous traffic.

The acquired business’s rebuilt campaigns began producing qualified live-in care enquiries rather than job applications, creating a credible additional paid acquisition channel. The wider work also left the team with better reporting, CRM journeys and processes that it could sustain with limited resource.

The founder later described the work as improving conversion, reducing cost per acquisition and creating a more resilient growth engine.

What it took

The breadth was the hard part. This was a very small team trying to improve acquisition, positioning, the website and customer journey, CRM, sales follow-up and marketplace operations at the same time, and then integrate another business halfway through.

There wasn’t enough resource to attack everything independently, so the work had to connect. Better customer insight informed the positioning; the positioning informed the website, content and sales journeys; better data made channel decisions easier; and automation and AI helped the team sustain more of it without adding lots of headcount.

The job was as much about deciding what to prioritise and building systems the existing team could keep using as it was about fixing any one channel.