About OptitechAutomation — One Operator, Built in Torbay
OptitechAutomation is a UK trades booking software platform built by Cristian, an operator in Torbay, Devon. This is the story of why I built it, what it took, and where it goes next. Written by me, in plain English, with the numbers that matter.
Cristian, Torbay, Devon.
I'm Cristian. I'm 38. I live in Torbay, Devon, which is the bit of coastline at the south-west corner of England where the railway from London terminates, the beaches face the English Channel, and the trades industry is the second-biggest local employer after tourism. I have been working in this market — first as a trade, then as an operator running other trades' back offices — since 2014.
OptitechAutomation is a one-operator company. There are no employees in the traditional sense. There is me, the operator, in Torbay. There are two contract engineers (one in Bristol, one in Manchester) who do platform engineering on retainer. There is a UK accountant, a UK solicitor, and a UK insurance broker. There is no marketing department, no business development team, no offshored support. When you message OptitechAutomation, you are messaging me.
Background as a trade
I trained as a plumber out of college in 2010. Worked for a Torbay-based heating company for four years. Went self-employed in 2014, joined Checkatrade in 2015, MyBuilder in 2017, and Trustpilot at some point because it seemed like the thing to do. Was paying about £4,200/year in marketplace fees plus per-lead charges by 2022. Left Checkatrade in late 2023 after one final argument about a lead they sent me that was already covered by a competitor on the same street.
Background as an operator
From 2020 onwards I started managing the back office (booking, invoicing, customer admin) for three other Torbay-area trades — a heating engineer, an electrician, and a drainage shop. That's where I learned booking software, scheduling logic, and the operator's view of why so much of this stuff is broken. By 2024 I was running back-office systems for 8 UK trades businesses across the South West.
Sixty verified complaints about every major platform.
Before writing a line of code I did six months of research. I read 60+ verified complaint threads on the ScrewFix Community Forum, Reddit /r/UKtrades, Reddit /r/HVAC, Trustpilot, and the Capterra UK / GetApp UK review pages for ServiceTitan, Jobber, Housecall Pro, SimPRO, BigChange, Commusoft, Tradify, Powered Now, and Workever. I also interviewed 27 UK plumbers personally — most of them Torbay-area or Devon, some London, two in Manchester. The pattern was the same.
What they all hated
Contracts that won't let go. Exit fees. Data hostage on cancellation. Paywalls in front of Xero. US pricing in USD with a 30% conversion margin built in. Support queues that take 4 days to answer a billing question. "Premium" tiers required to access basic features. Auto-renew clauses with 90-day notice windows that lapse silently. Marketplace platforms (Checkatrade, MyBuilder, Bark) selling the same lead to 5 trades simultaneously, then taking a fee from each.
What they all wanted
"Just something that does quotes and invoicing without a degree in computers." That's a verbatim quote from the ScrewFix Community Forum, from a Devon plumber in 2025. Underneath that surface-level want, when you dug in: flat GBP pricing, no contracts, proper Xero, mobile app that works in a cellar, a real human at the other end of support, and not being responsible for managing a US-based platform that doesn't know what a CP12 is.
What didn't exist
A UK-built, GBP-priced, no-contract trades booking software with operator supervision. Tradify came closest but is Australian-built with limited offline support. Powered Now is UK and decent but lacks the bidding pool and dispatch engine. Workever is competent on dispatch but the contract is 12 months. So I built the platform that didn't exist.
The five deliberate choices that distinguish OptitechAutomation.
Most of these are obvious. The honest part is that they're deliberate choices with real trade-offs. I'm not chasing every customer in the UK. I'm chasing the right customer.
1. Operator supervision, not a support team
Every customer gets me, directly. UK hours, weekends off, but always nearby. This caps the company at roughly 100-200 customers before the model breaks — which is the whole point. We're not going to 10,000 customers. We're going to 200 of the right customers.
2. No marketplace / no per-lead
OptitechAutomation does not sell leads. Does not send you customers. Does not run a directory. Does not have an "OptitechAutomation Trusted Trader" badge for sale. We are pure booking software — the customers come from your own marketing, your existing reputation, your Google ranking, your van wraps. We just manage them.
3. UK-only
GBP pricing. UK VAT. UK CIS. UK Gas Safe / NICEIC / F-Gas integration. UK GDPR. Hosted in London. No US expansion plans. No Australian fork. We are UK trades software for UK trades businesses, and we'll stay that way.
4. The pledge, in writing
Every promise on the website is in your contract. Exit fees, data export, transparent pricing, offline mobile, Xero, no card to try, human support — clause 9 of the subscription agreement. Read the full pledge for the enforcement mechanism if we break it.
5. No VC, no PE, no exit-by-acquisition
OptitechAutomation is bootstrapped. No venture capital, no private equity, no convertible notes. The company will not be sold to a US PE firm — and the Founders' Cohort contracts contain an aggressive "PE-acquisition triggers cancel-with-refund" clause specifically because that's the most common way customers get burned in trades SaaS.
Because past 50, I can't physically deliver the promise.
I have done the maths on operator supervision. A bi-weekly business review with each Growth-tier customer takes 45-60 minutes including prep. A weekly review with each Dominator customer takes 60-90 minutes. Daily emails, alert response, and direct messaging take roughly 15-25 minutes per customer per week. At 50 Founders' Cohort customers across mixed tiers, that's about 45-55 hours per week of pure operator-customer time.
Past 50, the model breaks. I either have to hire (which changes the shape of the service and triggers the pledge's notification clause) or stop accepting new customers (which is the honest answer). Founders' Cohort 2 at 51-100 will go on a slightly higher locked rate, and after that we close the Founders programme and move to production pricing.
This is the most boring constraint in the company and also the most important. OptitechAutomation is small by design. It will never be a 10,000-customer platform. The customers we have, we know personally. The maths is the maths.
Torbay, Devon. South-west coast of England.
Torbay sits between Torquay, Paignton, and Brixham on the Devon coast. About 2.5 hours by train from London Paddington. About 5 hours by car from Manchester. The local trades industry is heating-led (a lot of older properties, a lot of holiday rentals), with strong electrical, drainage, and HVAC sectors driven by tourism infrastructure.
I work from a small office in central Torquay — TQ2 postcode area. The office is a single room with two desks, a kettle, a printer, and a whiteboard I draw the platform architecture on roughly once a fortnight. I'm in the office Tuesday through Friday, UK hours. Mondays I tend to be on site visits with customers in the Torbay / Plymouth / Exeter triangle.
Direct. No queue.
Three ways to reach me. All three land on me directly.
Book the call
Twenty minutes, UK hours, no sales script. The fastest way to find out if we're a fit.
Book a 20-min call →I read every message. UK weekdays, reply within 12 hours typically.
hello@optitechautomation.co.ukYou're talking to a real operator.
Not a sales rep, not a chatbot, not a founder who has cashed out and gone fishing. Just Cristian, in Torbay, Devon, running the OptitechAutomation platform end-to-end. If you've read this far, it's worth the twenty-minute call.