Beagle Direct matches homeowners with tradesmen who are right for the job and free to do it.

Executive summary.

The business. Beagle Direct Ltd is a UK technology company with two products. SiteDesk is the product a building or trades firm pays for. It does the firm's back-office admin, and from each job it makes the photos and notes the firm uses to win the next one. Beagle Direct is the booking platform. Other sites hand a homeowner a list to search through; Beagle Direct shows a few suitable tradesmen with examples of their real work, then books the job. The two products are one business. SiteDesk produces the work record that Beagle Direct shows to homeowners, and Beagle Direct sends each booked job back into SiteDesk for the firm to run.

What each side wants. Tradesmen want to get to the next job, do it well, get paid, and go home. Homeowners want to see real work before they commit, to book quickly, and to be looked after. Both products together meet both: the homeowner gets a booked job and the work record to trust it, and the tradesman gets the work and gets the admin done without leaving the tools.

How SiteDesk works. The tradesman sends a text or a voice note from the site, and SiteDesk does the admin. It produces a quote as a PDF and an online version with a compliant e-signature. It produces a valuation that updates the project figures and the document accounts use to raise the invoice. It reads an incoming email and drafts a reply for the operator to send. Nothing goes out until the operator approves it: SiteDesk prepares the work and a person decides. The admin is done, and the money is in the bank, before the tradesman gets home for dinner.

Why now. Run by someone who knows how to use it, AI can do this admin faster than a team of people would, working from a plain text or voice note. So the tradesman can get the admin done on site, during the day, between jobs, instead of doing it at home, tired, at the end of a day on the tools.

The customers. There were 885,200 construction-sector SMEs in the UK at the start of 2025. They are the largest part of British business that has not gone digital. Our customer is the family-builder and trades segment within that: around 690,000 sole traders and around 165,000 micro firms, about 855,000 firms in total, roughly 96% of the sector. Few competitors sell to them, so there is a lot of room.

How little software they use. About 70% of large firms already use software, but only 10% to 20% of micro firms do. Our segment uses the least, so the firms we can win are the ones the competition has not reached. The smallest firms still run on spreadsheets, paper and the phone, and those are the firms we sell to.

Why the booking platform fills up.

Most new networks fail because they start empty and nobody visits. Beagle Direct does not start empty. Firms pay for SiteDesk because it does the admin they least want to do, and every job a firm runs through SiteDesk produces the photos and notes that go onto Beagle Direct. So the booking platform fills up as a side effect of paid work, and a homeowner who comes to it sees real, recent work. No back-office app and no directory does both of these jobs at once.

SiteDesk does the firm's back-office admin from a text or a voice note, and from each job it makes the photos and notes the firm uses to win the next one. Beagle Direct takes a homeowner's enquiry, shows a few suitable tradesmen who are free, with examples of their real work, and books the job into SiteDesk once the homeowner has chosen. On Beagle Direct the job gets booked; it is not a list the homeowner has to search through.

The founder sold to our first customer directly. He liked the product enough to take shares and to recommend it, and his contacts have become our next customers. We sell this way until we have shown the product fits the market, then we hire a B2B sales team and grow fast. The trade buys software on a recommendation from someone it trusts, not from an advert, so we sell in the order that suits the customer.

The product also helps bring in the next customer. Other sites hand a homeowner a list to search through; Beagle Direct books the job, and shows each tradesman's real work. Every job a firm runs through SiteDesk produces the photos and notes that become its progress reports and billing, and that record of finished work helps win the firm its next job.

There are two kinds of product near us, and neither does what we do. One kind is back-office software, which the tradesman has to sit at a screen and type into. The other kind is directories, which give a homeowner a list to search through. Nobody does the part in between: show the homeowner suitable tradesmen and their real work, book the job, and do the firm's admin.

The product is live and running real jobs at a pilot firm.

We built the first working version in days, alongside an established Hertfordshire family builder with forty years in the trade. It is live at that firm, running real quotes on real jobs, from a single-room extension up to a six-figure side-and-rear extension. So this round is not for an idea: the product is built, in use, and doing real work.

Several more firms have said they are interested. Over the coming weeks we run them as pilots, then turn the pilots into paying customers. We do it in that order, a few firms at a time, with the founder onboarding each one himself.

The team.

Joel Smalley is the founder, architect and operator of Beagle Direct Ltd, the SiteDesk product and the Beagle Direct booking platform. He has taken the product into production already: the MVP is built and live, and the pilot firm's real back office was reverse-engineered into the product rather than guessed at. He holds 63.20% after Round 1, settling to 50.56% on full capitalisation, and remains sole director-designate.

Dale Smith is a principal of an established Hertfordshire family building firm with forty years in the trade, and holds 24.80% of Beagle Direct Ltd after Round 1, settling to 19.84% on full capitalisation, as a strategic shareholder and ambassador. He is the source of the validated workflow the product mirrors, and his network has given us our next customers.

Stage one is founder-led; the team is built at Round 2 as the base scales. Board and observer rights will be set in the shareholders' agreement at each close; any investor holding 10% or more may nominate one Non-Executive Director, subject to founder approval not unreasonably withheld.