The Story of CanCan
When co-founder Rhydian Lewis moved house with his young family he soon experienced what it’s like to get things done around the home. From finding an electrician to fit LED bulbs, to a plumber to ensure smooth bath times to a handyman to hang pictures and a home IT specialist to jack up the home broadband, he noticed a pattern: great tradespeople but not such great processes.
Rhydian felt there had to be a better way. Rhydian had experience of starting something from scratch, having previously founded an award-winning business called RateSetter (for which he was awarded an OBE), and his thoughts turned to how to bring to life a modern home maintenance platform.
The issue was that he didn't have the tradesperson’s perspective. And that’s where luck played a part.
Rhydian was introduced to Chris Gilbey. Having started out as a plumber, Chris was running a handyman business in London, called BBOJ. He had 20 years' experience and knew the juggling act of being a tradesperson: maintaining your skilled profession, while also finding new customers, keeping on top of admin and getting paid on time. Chris had concluded that tradespeople would benefit from a platform that addressed their key issues – new business, scheduling, admin – and freed them up to concentrate on what they do best: their skilled job.
With their shared vision, Rhydian and Chris mapped out the customer and trader experience, including the pinch points, and drew up a model to work for both sides. This was the inspiration for CanCan.
CanCan today
After raising the necessary investment and sourcing the right people, Rhydian and Chris opened CanCan's doors in late 2024. It immediately provided an easy and reliable platform, bringing modern processes and consistent standards to home services, and attracted very positive reviews from customers.
Today CanCan covers the London area. With hundreds of thousands of home jobs every year and multiple thousands of tradespeople, it's a huge marketplace of supply and demand and CanCan is busily serving both sides, with plans to expand its coverage nationwide soon.
Customers
Getting reliable tradespeople can be a challenge, but is normally possible in the end. Getting reliable tradespeople at a time that suits you is harder. Getting reliable tradespeople at a time that suits you and with great customer service and good admin is virtually impossible.
Impossible, that is, until CanCan came along. CanCan makes the experience of getting things done easier and more reliable. Our rigorous approval process for tradespeople means you know there’s a consistency in standards, while the amount of tradespeople on CanCan means you know you can get things done when it suits you.
Traders
Good traders have busy days. They’re highly skilled at what they do, but often dislike or feel held back by the constant demands of marketing to new customers and administering jobs. CanCan is the solution to make their lives easier and give them the potential to do more work. With a CanCan account they never need to have gaps in their working diary and they're freed up to make the most of their time and skill.
Becoming an approved trader on CanCan takes a few minutes and, all being well, means you can be accepting jobs in a few days. You can use CanCan as much or as little as you want. You don’t need to bid for jobs or pitch to the customer – you just accept the jobs you want and we organise the rest.
Underpinned by technology
CanCan is, in many ways, a technology platform. Given the central role of technology, CanCan sought and attracted a highly experienced CTO who had built multiple advanced systems.
We see CanCan as a form of ‘infrastructure’ for home services, providing a platform through which customers and tradespeople can transact with greater ease and efficiency.
This is underpinned by well-designed processes and our use of technology. By bringing to bear the latest technology, we are modernising home services bringing greater reliability, ease and efficiency to all parties.
CanCan has built technology to enable us to administer thousands of concurrent jobs and uses data and AI to continually improve the experience and efficiency. CanCan’s model has opened up new opportunities for both the customer and the tradesperson – maximising the potential between two big pools of supply and demand.
The way we are
We aim to make things simple. We think things through and focus on good processes, so that everything else becomes simpler. Life’s busy enough and we want to enable customers and tradespeople to be able to focus on the important and value-add things.
We value professionalism and things being done with care and attention, with standards and integrity at its heart. A lot of great home services work is let down by poor admin or scheduling and a platform bringing consistent standards allows the skill of the professional to shine and allows the consumer to feel more in control of what they want.
We are restless and seek to innovate. We want things to be done well and are willing to push to make it happen. We keep trying to improve, not resting on laurels but striving for the best possible experience for our customers and traders.