Rachel Ray
any strategy a company embarked upon to its bottom line. “That was a really interesting time for me,” she says. “It opened up the real world of business and helped me not just look at the numbers but see the actual drivers behind them.” Over the course of the next couple of years, Ray had two daughters, motivating her and her husband to move back to the UK. Settling in Altrincham, Ray started consulting freelance while her husband Rob founded a property maintenance company, which led to a rather serendipitous encounter. “One day one of his clients said ‘oh, do you offer cleaning services?’” Ray says. “Being a good entrepreneur, he said ‘yes, we do’.” In light of her business consultancy background, when it came to putting together a quote for this work Ray was the obvious choice. And as she started to consider what someone might require from a cleaning service, she couldn’t help but reflect on her experience as a busy working mum – dividing her time between her freelance work and raising her daughters meant she had little time to declutter or tackle the ironing that was piling up. “I didn’t just want somebody to clean: I wanted somebody to organise, tidy and really provide a housekeeping service,” she says. “So when I went to deliver the first quote that’s really what I had in mind.” Having wowed the client with her pitch, Ray began to see that there might be a market for this kind of service and she resolved to turn it into a full-time business. But first she decided to conduct some industry research, building up a picture of the sector both from reports on the industry and competitor research. “What I’d envisaged just wasn’t provided by other domestic cleaning companies,” she says. “They tended to only focus on cleaning, whereas for us it was about providing a management service that took the stress and pressure out of busy working people’s lives.” On top of this, Ray found that much of the branding out there tended to be quite oldfashioned and not very relevant to 21st century working women. Keen to buck this trend, she christened her new business Bright & Beautiful. However, this wasn’t the only thing Ray discovered when researching the industry: she also found a lot of companies utilised rather troubling employment practices. “There were a lot of cash-in-hand agencies where I could see that the cleaner was exploited,” she says. “They weren’t paid properly, they didn’t really have any sense of being appreciated or respected in their role and it was always a little bit demeaning.”
MAY 2017 | elitefranchise
Cover story - Rachel Ray.indd 2
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28/04/2017 17:28