Outreach: email, SMS, calls and post

Four groups, four routes

Section 05 of the six-month plan covers contractors (hubs). Each one brings about ten solos.

The list from Companies House, contact details from their websites

We already hold every active construction company from Companies House, coded by trade. 2,016 of them name CIS in their filed accounts. We take the contact details from each company's own website.

The route

1. Pick the batch. Start with electrical and plumbing, the two biggest trades, and put the 2,016 companies that name CIS in their accounts first. Leave out any company with a proposal to strike off.
2. Find the website. Search the company name and postcode (DataForSEO, about $1.50 per 1,000 lookups). Keep only matches where the site names the company.
3. Take the contact details the company publishes there (contact page or footer), and record the page and the date. Never guess an address like info@. Verify every address before sending (MillionVerifier, $89 for 50,000).
4. Send three emails over about ten days, then stop. The first carries the privacy line and an opt-out. The second carries a thumbnail of the matching trade's Bodge video.
5. Letter the non-responders at the trading address on their website, with a QR code to the landing page.

Does Zee Solo work for limited-company subbies? The brief describes the man in the van, and a limited company's bookkeeping is different. If Zee Solo doesn't suit them yet, this group moves to later and we email only accountants and sign-ups. This is the first question in section 12.

Calls, post, and consent collected everywhere else

Sole traders are the biggest group, and we don't cold email or text them. We call and write to them, and collect their consent so we can email and text them later.

164 firms that sell CIS services, and a partner offer

An accountant with 40 subbie clients is one conversation instead of 40 cold emails. The voice guide sets the tone: accountants are a channel, never the enemy, and Plus sells their review.

• The list: 164 UK accountancy and bookkeeping firms that market CIS services, each with a contact route they publish themselves (section 13). We keep the 9 CIS refund firms we found separate: they compete with us and aren't partners.
• The hidden list: 567 registered-office postcodes each hold 25 or more active trade companies. Many are likely accountants' offices, and some formation agents or virtual offices. Once we identify the firm at each one, we can rank accountants by how many construction clients they have.
• The offer, modelled on other partner programmes: QuickBooks ProAdvisor gives clients 50% off when the accountant bills them, plus points and a directory listing. Clear Books gives clients 15–35% off for life and the practice free use. Coconut, the closest match to Zee Solo, adds a partner manager and onboarding help. For Zee Solo, Valla decides from this starting point:
  • a free practice account that can see each client's invoices, statements and MTD-ready records
  • a lasting discount on Standard for clients who join through a practice (30% is an assumption to test), or a revenue share instead
  • a "find a CIS accountant" listing once a practice has three active clients
  • Plus-tier review work sent to partner practices, so Zee Solo brings them paid work
  • a co-branded onboarding kit for their subbie clients, inside the Claims Register rules
• Where they'll see it: ICB's partner newsletter and software accreditation, the Bookkeepers Summit (16 November 2026), AccountingWEB sponsored posts, and Accountex London and FAB in 2027. CIS payroll firms issue the deduction statements for the agency subbies they pay, so we can offer them a statement-import partnership.
• The channels: email (most firms are companies or LLPs), AccountingWEB and bookkeeper communities, and the accountant media in the partner list.

Lifecycle email and SMS from day one

The six-month plan's biggest wins are inside the app: getting cold sign-ups past the UTR screen and through the first invoice. These messages do that. They run on Loops (about £37 a month at 2,500 contacts, email only) or Customer.io (about £75, with SMS and push), both fed by PostHog.

The app has to collect the phone number and show the opt-out wording at sign-up, or none of this SMS can run. This is an ask in section 12.

Four drafts, in the voice guide's words

These are drafts. Each goes through the Claims Register before use.

One pipeline, one suppression list, and a person approves every batch

• Most of this is built. Our NIGHTSHIFT outreach engine already records the source of every contact, holds drafts for a person to approve, and runs a compliance and suppression check on every send. It needs the UK rules as the solicitor confirms them, a UK text provider and Valla's sender details. Our Companies House build supplies the list, and our email-deliverability checks run on every new domain.
• Separate sending domains, never Valla's main one, with SPF, DKIM, DMARC and one-click unsubscribe. Gmail and Yahoo require these for bulk senders, and Gmail asks for a spam rate under 0.1%, never reaching 0.3%. New inboxes need two to three weeks of warm-up. If we don't buy them this week, cold email slips into November.
• Safe volume: Instantly recommends 30 campaign emails per inbox a day, and Smartlead sees most senders at 8–24. Ten inboxes at 25 a day send about 5,000 a month, follow-ups included.
• Every contact carries its source: the page, the date and the entity type. That record answers "where did you get my details?".
• Video in email: a still thumbnail under 50KB with a play button, linking to the matching trade's Bodge video. Embedded video and heavy GIFs hurt deliverability.

About £2,000 for the first month, mostly post

GBP, excluding VAT, at the first month's pilot volumes. US prices converted at the European Central Bank rate on 22 September 2026 (US$1 = £0.748).

On top of this: the telemarketer's time, and a solicitor's review of the rules, the legitimate-interest assessment and the wording (quote needed). Royal Mail prices rise on 5 October, which adds about 13% to postage on later letters. Letters drive the total: cut them to 500 and the month costs about £800.

Warm up now, pilot in October, scale what works

We compare cost per install with the paid channels

• The main number: cost per install and per first invoice, by channel and segment, set against the six-month plan's paid benchmark of £3–£10 an install. Every email, letter and call has its own tracked link or QR code.
• Email: reply rate and positive replies. Published benchmarks depend on how they're counted: Instantly's 2026 report gives 3.43% average replies across its users; Belkins, counting per email sent, has the UK at 0.48% and construction at about 0.56–0.60%. All are vendor data. Our pilot gives us our own number.
• Post: JICMAIL's tracker puts cold direct mail at about 1.0% response, and says a QR code makes a website visit 60% more likely. That is household consumer data, and may not hold for trades.
• The stop signals: a spam rate above 0.1%, bounces over 2%, any complaint, or opt-outs well above replies. Any one pauses the channel until it's fixed.

Six risks, and what we do about each

Eight things, the first three this week

1. Does Zee Solo work for limited-company subbies? The answer decides whether the biggest group we can email stays in the plan.
2. A solicitor's read of the rules for each group, the legitimate-interest assessment we'll draft, and the wording for consent, privacy and opt-outs. Include this question: when a one-person company's director uses a mobile contract in their own name, is a text to it treated as going to a company or to an individual?
3. Sending domains bought now (we'll suggest names), so the inboxes are warm by mid-October.
4. Sender details: the company name and address that appear on every message, and a privacy page covering outreach, where we got people's details, and how to opt out.
5. The telemarketer's hours for 20 hours in October, and agreement to TPS and CTPS screening.
6. Phone number and marketing opt-out at sign-up in the app, so lifecycle SMS can run.
7. A UK number that can receive texts for the keyword line (BODGE, or whatever we choose).
8. A budget call on letters: the 2,000-letter test is about £1,650, most of the first month.

The research behind this page

Research carried out 23 September 2026. "Partial" means the page loaded through an extraction tool or a secondary source. "Unverified" means it didn't load. We list only contact routes the firms publish themselves, and guessed no addresses.