From humble beginnings
Christine Bonham-Horton founded BHT on 1st October 1997 in our conservatory.
I was a management consultant at that time, and Chris worked all on her own for a whole year, finding new clients for my fellow consultants.
She decided, at the end of that year, that we should build on that foundation, so we began marketing it, and the business grew.
The ups and the downs
Throughout the 25 years, we have experienced expansion and contraction in equal measure.
We built a strong reputation for integrity and honesty, and the business grew. It was never our intention to be a large company but to be a solid family business that people could rely on.
Like everyone else, the pandemic took away most of our livelihood. We struggled through it, supported by our loyal call-handling clients and the government’s furlough scheme.
Once through those two years, our clients came back to us, and we started to pick up steam only to be knocked back again, like everyone else, by the Putin created energy crisis and rising inflation.
We are proud that our business has remained strong, and now we are looking at the next few years with anticipation and excitement.
Call-handling
From 1997 to 2010, we earned the reputation of “the telemarketing company with the warm and friendly approach.” No hard selling and no pushing. If someone says “No”, we believe they mean “No” and immediately get out of their hair.
That approach led us to a new income stream in 2010 – Call-handling. One of our telemarketing clients received good feed-back about our “soft” telemarketing approach, and so they asked us to take their calls.
That part of our business has grown organically over the years and is still supporting businesses to this day.
Dig-e-Tel aka LinkedIn Marketing
The pandemic forced us to look at the effectiveness of telemarketing as a post-Covid marketing tool. As you know, there was an enforced shift in working behaviour, the legacy of which is that many people continue to work from home, either on a full-time or part-time basis.
Consequently, we decided to develop a marketing tool that could reach out to potential contacts wherever they worked, and Dig-e-Tel was invented.
Dig-e-Tel is a progressive marketing system that uses the power of LinkedIn, email, and telephone, combined with blogging and social media messaging, to find new business opportunities.
We began trialling it in September 2020, at the height of the pandemic, winning our first contract in December 2020.
That new client was so impressed with this new approach that they contracted us to employ it for them, and it won them their first contract in April 2021.
Now we’re looking to a positive future
Given that we can now deploy a range of very effective marketing tools, we are looking at a positive future.
We are planning steady growth in turnover and profitability over the next couple of years in conjunction with an expansion of our team so that we can move the company to the next level.
Let us share our celebration with you
This is such a momentous time for us that we would like to mark it in a very special way.
