Carol Stewart-Gill is cleaning the floor with Dublcheck’s competition

Building a business empire from scratch isn’t easy. But if you have a degree of tenacity and determination, you can make your dreams a reality. Carol Stewart-Gill, founder and chairwoman of Dublcheck, the cleaning franchise, is living proof of this: with sheer grit and resolve she has created a company that has drawn both adulation and emulation in equal measure.

Like many entrepreneurs, Stewart-Gill found the education system inaccessible – although perhaps not for the reasons you might expect. “I went to a Welsh-speaking school but didn’t speak the language,” she explains. “It was frustrating because I knew I had a lot to give.” Stewart-Gill left education with five O-levels and entered secretarial college; fortunately she has since found that aptitude, rather than academics, are more important in creating commercial success. “I truly believe now – having been what I’ve been through – that it’s not about your qualification set,” she says. “It’s the person that actually creates success.”

“But Stewart-Gill didn’t rush out into the world of work: for some time her main focus was being a stay-at-home wife and mother. However, in 1993, a change in life circumstances meant that her family needed an additional income stream. And one of the first ideas that came into Stewart-Gill’s head was commercial cleaning. “I thought ‘blimey, it can’t be that difficult’,” she says. “So out I went, knocked on doors and eventually got my first contract.” Before long, this one contract had multiplied into many more and she realised that she needed to take on some outside help. Franchising seemed the obvious choice.

While the transition from business owner to franchisor can be a tricky one, the fact that Stewart-Gill was still a relative newcomer to the industry meant that she could more easily relate to those she was looking to entice. “You’re singing from the same hymn sheet as people who are going into it,” she says. “Even people that have previously been managing directors can still be nervous because they’re going into an industry that they’re not familiar with.”

This helped her create an attractive model with which to draw in franchisees. But it’s not just a case of building it and assuming they will come; the fledgling franchise needed to start getting the word out. “At the time, we were just a Chester-based operation,” Stewart-Gill says. “So we advertised locally and, before I knew it, we’d got our first franchisee.”

Having taken on its first franchisee to keep up with demand, Dublcheck suddenly found its client numbers exploding. “Once we began franchising, we just kept getting more and more contracts,” says Stewart-Gill. In part, she attributes this to customers liking the fact that they would be dealing with someone who had a direct stake in the business. “We were able to say the person responsible for the cleaning of your office owns their business,” she says. Rather than being handled by an individual who had little reason to do a good job, they knew the team cleaning their office would be being managed by someone with a genuine interest in delivering the best results. “That’s how we stood out from the crowd,” she says.