Returning a mature care marketplace to revenue growth

The situation

Hometouch is a profitable, ten-year-old live-in care marketplace in a highly competitive category. Revenue had flattened, despite a strong reputation, genuine expertise and a service customers valued highly.

There were constraints 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 with the CEO on growth, positioning and acquisition, and with the COO on the marketplace and supply side.

What I did

I started with customer research to understand what people valued about Hometouch and where the commercial journey was getting in the way. The service had real credibility and expertise, but much of that was difficult to see before somebody enquired.

That work informed a sharper proposition and a wider redesign of the customer journey, including the website, lead capture, sales follow-up and CRM. At the same time, I looked at where sales were actually coming from and whether the investment behind each channel was justified.

Organic search was particularly important. I replaced the incumbent agency and moved away from thousands of near-duplicate location pages towards stronger editorial content built around the expertise already inside the business. I also rebuilt reporting and workflows in HubSpot, alongside templates, automation and AI-assisted processes that helped a very small team produce more consistently.

On the supply side, I worked with the COO on matching and carer engagement: how briefs were matched, and how Hometouch communicated with and re-engaged its existing carer base.

Midway through the engagement, Hometouch acquired a competitor. I supported the due diligence and then led the commercial integration: clarifying how the two propositions should sit alongside each other, 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. The organic search work focused on the pages that mattered most to the business rather than chasing overall volume. In an initial test, five previously declining pages were rewritten, and the strongest delivered up to four times its previous traffic. These were commercially important pages, so the extra traffic went to the parts of the site that actually generated enquiries.

The acquired business also became a genuine acquisition channel. Its rebuilt campaigns began producing qualified live-in-care enquiries rather than job applications, giving Hometouch a credible additional source of paid growth.

The wider work also strengthened the commercial setup for the longer term: clearer positioning, better reporting, improved CRM journeys and a set of processes the small team could sustain without adding significant headcount.

Jamie Wilson, Hometouch’s founder and CEO, described the work as delivering “a measurable uplift in conversion rates, lower cost per acquisition and a stronger, more resilient growth engine.”

What it took

Breadth was the problem. 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 shaped 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.

More demand was never going to be enough on its own. Extra enquiries mattered little if the marketplace couldn’t match people to the right carer quickly enough.

The job was to keep improving the core business while making sure the team could actually sustain what was built.