One platform that manages your jobs, builds your website, generates your leads, and tracks your crew — all connected. From the first enquiry to the five-star review.
We called it SwarmCatcher because we built it for our own bee removal business — and it catches the swarm of customers searching for your service. Now it works for any trade.
Some installers spend £600–1,200 a month across separate job software, a website, an SEO agency and lead platforms, and none of it shares a single record. The rest run the whole business out of a notebook, a phone and a shared inbox — cheaper, right up until you count the enquiries that quietly went cold while you were up a ladder. Both end up in the same place: the work gets done, and nothing you did gets you the next job.
Jobber for scheduling. A different website. Checkatrade for leads. Google Sheets for tracking. Four logins, duplicate data entry, nothing connected.
You rent leads from directories at £10–50 each. Stop paying, leads stop coming. You never build anything that lasts.
Your SEO agency doesn't know your job system exists. Your job system doesn't request reviews. Reviews don't feed back into rankings. The loop is broken.
Eight stages, each one handing off to the next without anybody re-typing anything. More jobs mean more reviews. More reviews mean higher rankings. Higher rankings mean more enquiries. The parts other platforms leave to you — the safety pack, the chasing, the filing — are inside the loop, not bolted onto it.
These are not settings you have to remember to switch on. Each one fires as the job moves through the stage above it.
Job management, crew app, local SEO, safety packs, job costing, compliance tracking — all built for how trades actually work, and all set up around how you work.
Full lifecycle from enquiry to invoice. Visual calendar with crew allocation. Drag jobs, reschedule, add notes. Everything your Jobber does, and more.
Your crew opens a PIN-protected app on their phone — no app store, no install, works on whatever handset they already carry. Today’s jobs, the customer’s own photos, the safety pack, the site contact. Tap the address and Google Maps opens with the route (iPhones are offered Apple Maps as well). Where the site has a what3words square, that’s tappable too — so the van lands at the right gate rather than a postcode centroid halfway down the lane. It will never invent a square: an unverified one is left off rather than guessed at.
We build a landing page for every town you serve. "Solar Panel Installation in Bridgend" — not a generic directory listing, your business, your phone number, ranking on Google.
Send an estimate and stop worrying. Day 3, day 7, day 14 — professional follow-ups go out automatically. When they accept, the job goes straight onto your calendar.
Every certificate, inspection and renewal in one register — MCS, PASMA, IPAF, 18th Edition, face-fit, harness and tower inspections, vehicle MOT and insurance — each with its own expiry alert. You find out weeks before a ticket lapses, not when a site turns your crew away.
Enquiry emails matched to existing customers automatically. New enquiries flagged for action. No more digging through your inbox wondering who emailed about what.
See exactly where you rank in every town, every week. Google Search Console data, Core Web Vitals, monthly reports. Know what's working and what needs attention.
Job complete? Invoice pushed to QuickFile, Xero, or QuickBooks automatically. No double entry, no end-of-month scramble. Your accounts stay up to date.
Your enquiry form asks the right questions for YOUR trade — with conditional logic that shows or hides questions based on previous answers. Solar on a flat roof? Scaffolding question appears. Trees near a listed building? Conservation checks triggered. The form pre-qualifies the job before you even call back. They can stop halfway and come back to it — progress is held against their link on the server, not in one browser, so they can start on the laptop, finish on the phone in the loft, and pick up on the exact question they left. A form they already finished reopens as finished rather than starting over.
The risk assessment and method statement are drafted from the job’s own answers — access, height, materials, crew size — not from last job’s document with the address swapped. Send it and the PDF attaches itself; the system refuses to send “please find attached” with nothing attached. The client confirms receipt with one click and the sent date records itself. Nobody ticks a box.
Estimates, chasers, assessment fees, safety packs and completion notes all compose from your own templates, built out of blocks you tick on and off per job. Every one carries a button the customer can actually press — accept the estimate, confirm the safety pack, book the assessment — and pressing it moves the job on your side. No re-keying, no “did they ever reply?”
Materials used, receipts, mileage, parking, congestion charges, overnight stays — logged against the job either by the crew on their phone or by whoever is in the office, into the same list, from the same picklist. Receipt photos and odometer readings are captured where they happen — and a photographed receipt is filed straight into your document store as a searchable, OCR’d accounting record against that job, not dumped into the job’s photo gallery for someone to find later. Materials price themselves from your rate card, with your markup and your wastage allowance, and the charges freeze when you invoice — so putting your prices up next month never quietly rewrites what last month’s job cost.
Access is set per person, not one shared login. Your bookkeeper gets a genuinely read-only view. Your crew see only the jobs they are allocated to — and never your pricing or your customer emails, because those are never sent to the phone in the first place. Every person has their own PIN, every device is enrolled individually, and a single phone can be revoked on its own if it walks.
The reason firms stay on software they have outgrown is the thought of leaving ten years of records behind. You don’t have to. We take what you already have — whatever system it is sitting in, or a spreadsheet, or nothing but a mailbox — and we rebuild it inside your new one before you go live. Old jobs, customers, addresses, prices, suppliers, hotel stays, what each job actually cost. Then we go further: your old email archive is mined to reconstruct customer history, so a name you have not heard from in four years still arrives with its previous jobs, its photos and its conversation attached.
We know it works because we did it to ourselves: 1,012 jobs going back years, lifted out of a spreadsheet, matched back to live records by email, phone and address — and 74 places where the old records contradicted themselves flagged for a human rather than quietly imported. Overlapping site visits, duplicates, hours that didn’t match the times, dates nothing could read. You get told what is wrong with your own history instead of inheriting it.
Most software asks you to describe your business using its words. This one is set up using yours. Every installation is configured before you get the keys — and configured means configured, not a colour scheme and your logo in the corner:
No two setups look the same, because no two businesses are the same. You are not adapting your workflow to fit our software — we adapt the software to fit your workflow. And when the way you work changes, we change it again. That is what a managed service buys you that a licence never does.
You are not tied into anybody’s idea of how the job should run. There is no rigid template to work around and no feature you are stuck with because it suits our roadmap. If a screen, a price rule, a form question or an email doesn’t match how you actually work, we change it — that is the service, not a paid extra.
And nothing with a price on it goes out unread. No estimate, no set of figures and no wording reaches your customer until you have looked at it and pressed send — the same goes for the safety pack. The invoice lands in your accounts package as a draft, not a posted entry. Prices freeze when you lock the job, not before. Where the system doesn’t know something — a material with no rate, a what3words it can’t verify — it says so and leaves it blank rather than guessing. The chasers are the deliberate exception: the follow-up nudges go out on their own, in wording and on a cadence you set once, because chasing is the job that never gets done otherwise.
What we have taken away is not the decision. It is the hour of typing, copying, chasing and filing that used to sit in front of it. You still say yes. You just stop doing the admin that used to come first.
We built this system for our own bee removal business over three years. The names came from what each part does. They stuck because they're true.
Together they form The Colony — your entire business, running on one platform. We didn’t build software and go looking for a trade to sell it to. We ran the trade, hit the same problems you hit, and built the system that solved them.
They sell job software. We sell a complete business system — set up around your trade, your prices and your paperwork. The rows in bold are the ones nobody else fills in.
| Feature | Jobber | Tradify | HousecallPro | SwarmCatcher |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The basics — everyone does these | ||||
| Job lifecycle management | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Visual calendar & crew allocation | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Crew mobile app | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Invoicing | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | Pushed to your accounts package |
| Access rights per person | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | Per person, incl. read-only bookkeeper |
| Getting found — where the others stop | ||||
| Real local SEO website | Brochure only | — | £99/mo add-on | Core feature |
| Town-level landing pages | — | — | — | At scale |
| SEO monitoring & rank tracking | — | — | — | Built in |
| Winning the work | ||||
| Trade-built enquiry form, conditional questions | Basic form | — | Basic form | Branching, trade-built |
| AI photo triage of enquiries | — | — | — | Built in |
| Automated estimate chasing | Basic | — | Basic | Multi-stage |
| Emails that move the job when the customer clicks | Quote approval | — | Quote approval | Estimate, safety pack, assessment |
| Email auto-classification & thread matching | — | — | — | Built in |
| Doing the work safely — the paperwork nobody else touches | ||||
| RAMS built from the job’s own answers | — | — | — | Built in |
| Safety pack attached, sent and logged automatically | — | — | — | Cannot send unattached |
| Client confirms receipt of the safety pack | — | — | — | One click, date stamped |
| Safety documents on the crew’s phones | — | — | — | Plus expiring link for site managers |
| Certification register with expiry alerts | — | Certs only | — | Full register |
| Enquiry form can be paused and resumed on any device | — | — | — | Server-side, per link |
| One-tap navigation from the job address | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | Maps + what3words square |
| Knowing what the job actually cost | ||||
| Job costs captured on the phone | Time & materials | Time & materials | Time & materials | Receipts, odometer, mileage, one list |
| Receipts photographed on site become OCR’d records | — | Attach to job | Attach to job | Filed & searchable |
| Materials priced from your own rate card | — | Price list | Price list | Markup and wastage per material |
| Charges frozen at invoicing | — | — | — | Past jobs never re-price |
| Getting started | ||||
| Import your existing records | CSV import | CSV import | CSV import | Migrated for you, from any system |
| Customer history rebuilt from your old emails | — | — | — | Yes |
| Contradictions in your old data flagged, not imported | — | — | — | Yes |
| Fit and cost | ||||
| Configured to your trade before you start | Self-setup | Self-setup | Paid onboarding | Done for you |
| Per-user pricing | +£29/user | £34–44/user | +£35/user | Flat rate |
| Total cost (5-person team + SEO) | £500–1,200/mo | £550–1,200/mo | £550–1,300/mo | £349–499/mo |
Your whole crew uses it. One price, no surprises. Cancel anytime after 3 months.
A typical domestic solar installation bills £6,500–7,500. One additional job in six months covers the entire subscription — and the system keeps generating enquiries every month after that.
This isn't a concept or a beta. We've been running this system for our own specialist trade business for three years. Here's what it's done.
Different trade, same engine. The system that generated these results is the same one we set up for your business — adapted for your trade, your towns, your services.
This is the last step of the loop and the first step of the next one. The system asks while the job is still fresh in their mind, points the happy ones at your Google profile, and those reviews are exactly what lift you in the local results — so the next customer finds you before they find anybody else.
Nobody has to remember to ask. That is the whole point: the step everyone means to do and never does is the one holding your rankings up.
15 minutes. A screen share with a live system set up for your trade and your area. No slides, no hard sell — just the product.