When Karen Prewer joined him in Newport for his launch in June 2024, James Cook admitted he was nervous. It was the first week of his My Property Pros franchise and he had the doubts any new business owner would recognise.
“This time next year,” Karen told him, “I’ll be sending new franchisees to you for training.”
She was right. Two years on, James is one of the people the network sends new franchisees to. He runs two vans and two full-time staff across two territories, he has won a £25,000 warehouse contract and a £100,000 commercial project, and he is hiring again.
Before any of it, he taught people to drive.
James, fondly known as Cookie, ran his own driving school for seven years. Seven years in the passenger seat, with a set of dual controls and somebody else steering. He found MPP by accident, and by then he had stopped expecting to. He had signed up to a franchise portal and was getting alerts almost daily without anything standing out.
“I drove past one of the vans and it really caught my eye,” he says. “By coincidence, later that day an email dropped into my inbox and I recognised the branding immediately. From the moment I started reading, I was hooked. The story behind the business, the growth potential, the constant thread of support with a community feel. It was the whole package.”
During his due diligence, founders Karen and Dave Prewer told him the business was widening well beyond window cleaning, gutter clearance and pressure washing, with several new revenue streams about to be introduced across the network. Roof cleaning was the one he could not stop thinking about.
He could have built a window cleaning round quickly and had money coming in from week one. He chose not to.
“It made so much sense to me,” says James. “The quick route was a window cleaning round, but that was not the business I wanted to build. I would rather start from nothing and build it around the big jobs. Roof cleans, whole house soft washes, commercial work. One of those can be worth what a month of window rounds brings in. I knew I could hit the market hard, and that by focusing on roof cleaning I could generate serious income fast.”
Then he did something no franchisee had done before. Part way through his initial training, he tore up the business plan he had arrived with and staked the business on the higher value end of the service list. He bought the roof cleaning equipment upfront and pointed every pound of his marketing at work the network had barely started selling.
His family were not sure about any of it. When he first told them he was leaving instructing for exterior cleaning, they were openly shocked.
“Everyone gets it now,” he says. “They can see I’m part of something much bigger than myself and that I have the tools to build a serious asset.”
The decision, and what it delivered
The decision showed up in the numbers almost immediately. His first four months broke the network’s launch record, with just under £19,000 of turnover and an average clean price 272% higher than the network norm at the time.
It has not slowed since. Sales are up 106% over the last twelve months, in which he took on 349 new customers, 18% ahead of the plan he set himself. He has completed 63 soft washing jobs, among the highest in the network, including a single job worth £6,295. In total the business has turned over £221,000 since launch, and every penny of that was earned with one van.
The next step came from a different direction entirely. Cookie was one of the first franchisees to trial MPP’s new commercial team, and James Ainsworth, the network’s Head of Sales and Growth, brought him a £25,000 warehouse contract.
MPP then built MAX, a bespoke commercial outreach system designed to do that job at scale, with Ainsworth heading up national and commercial outreach across the network. Launched in early 2026, MAX now contacts 1,200 potential commercial customers a day.
What it brought Cookie was considerably bigger than the warehouse: a £100,000 project for a local authority, revamping multiple residential estates through roof cleaning and soft washing. Phase one covers 66 properties and is worth £46,000 on its own. Phase two takes in another 83, and together the two phases make up the £100,000. He expects to complete both within three months, alongside the rest of his work. Phase three is already under discussion.
The reason it keeps rolling is money, but not the money most people expect. Cleaning a roof and soft washing a render costs a fraction of redecorating or replacing them, and it buys the client years before either becomes necessary. For commercial clients like councils and housing associations, weighing maintenance budgets that never stretch far enough, that is a straightforward calculation.
Winning that work is the harder part. Buyers at this scale will not hand dozens of properties to an unproven one van operator, however good the quote looks. They need evidence that a supplier can resource the job, deliver it to a standard across every property and stand behind it afterwards. Cookie had that evidence from day one, because it came from the network rather than from him alone.
“They are not comparing us to another cleaner. They are comparing us to a repaint or a re-roof, and against those numbers we are exceptional value.”
“That is the whole conversation with commercial clients,” says James. “Once a client has watched 66 properties come back looking new, for a fraction of what they had set aside, the next phase is a much easier conversation.”
The estate revamp is a project rather than a rolling contract, but the relationship behind it is ongoing. To service the work he has bought a second van and taken on a second employee, and that van is one of the largest in the network, designed and built specifically to handle the scale of enquiry he is now fielding.
“The commercial work is a different game,” he says. “You are quoting for buildings rather than houses, and the jobs are longer, bigger and planned weeks out. Having the van and the team to say yes to that work is the whole point. If you cannot resource it, you cannot win it.”
The effect on a busy week has been immediate. A typical week had been turning over around £8,000. Since the commercial work started, his best week has hit £18,000.
He is now about to advertise for a third member of staff, and has taken on a second territory covering Chepstow, Caldicot and the Monmouthshire towns east of the city.
What other people make of it
My Property Pros Newport was named Exterior Cleaning Business of the Year for Wales at the 2025/26 Prestige Awards, and won South East Wales Cleaning Service of the Year at the 2025 Best of Welsh Awards. It is a finalist again in 2026, this time in the home improvement business category rather than cleaning.
The change of category is the more telling of the two facts. In 2025 the business was judged as a cleaning service. A year later it is judged against home improvement businesses, which is a fair description of a £100,000 project spanning multiple estates.
Leading the network
The prediction Karen made has turned into his actual role. New franchisees are sent to him for training, and he is always on hand for the rest of the network, whether that is a second opinion on a quote or a way into a job someone has not tackled before.
“If you’d told me in my first month I’d be in this position, training people and helping them follow the same route, I wouldn’t have believed it,” he says. “But the support goes both ways. There is always someone at the end of the phone, and there always was, right from the start when I needed it most.”
What he tells people who ask
“Just do it. If you’ve got as far as showing an interest, you won’t find a single reason not to. It will change your life.”
Two years ago he was standing in Newport telling the founder of the business he was nervous. He is now the person the nervous ones get sent to, and there is nobody sitting beside him with dual controls.
About My Property Pros
Established in 1996 and now celebrating 30 years, My Property Pros is the UK’s first and only national exterior property cleaning franchise. The multi award winning network is rated five stars on Trustpilot, and franchisees run fully equipped vans offering roof and render cleaning, gutter clearing, pressure washing and window cleaning, with proprietary software, commercial lead generation through MAX, and lifelong training and support. Almost all cleaning is completed from the ground.
Individual results vary. The figures in this case study relate to James Cook’s business and were confirmed by him in writing. They are not a guarantee or projection of earnings for any other franchisee.
Could you do what Cookie did?
My Property Pros franchisees come from every background going. An architect, a quantity surveyor, a general manager, a chef, a driving instructor. If you are wondering whether it could work for you, the best place to start is an informal conversation. No obligation on either side.