At the tender age of 27 years, Ralf Hodgson is Cabal's youngest member and is impressing widely with his no-frills approach to scaling Tidal Services - the UK's uber for window cleaning.
In this interview, Ralf shares his experience from first taking the leap into his own business, pivoting from a traditional window cleaning business into a tech-led company, scaling marketplaces and more.
💡 What sparked the idea for Tidal?
Ralf’s journey into entrepreneurship began with an unexpected YouTube rabbit hole. What started as a teenage search for pocket-money ideas led him to learning how to clean windows. Within weeks, he was out cleaning windows in his village - with a squeegee, a ladder and some homemade business cards, his was soon employing his mates just to keep up with demand. From there, it snowballed: one van became three, and soon he was franchising across the UK.
🚀 When things start to scale, how did he adjust?
After growing the business in a traditional way, Ralf hit a ceiling, with each new area requiring heavy upfront investment in vehicles and kit - the capital intensity made scaling quite arduous. That’s when he made the crucible decision to evolve from a pure operational window cleaning business into a tech platform. Tidal would become a marketplace - connecting window cleaners and customers through technology rather than owning the entire operation. They partnered with Founder + Lightning (now The Lightning Group) to bring the platform to life.
🧠How did he approach marketplace dynamics?
Like most marketplaces, Tidal faced the question: how to balance supply and demand as they scale? Initially they took a demand-led approach, investing heavily in Facebook ads, giving Ralf a grip on the investment required to build the demand for a new cleaning run - £20 spent reliably brought in a £20/month customer, with a 36-month LTV... pretty solid unit economics. The key was pairing this demand with supply in areas where window cleaners were available and competition was low. It's a highly tactical, region-by-region approach. And one that they've continued to secure investment off the back of.
🎯 The one piece of advice Ralf would give to other founders?
Ralf is refreshingly honest about how advice works: take it all in, but trust your gut and don't feel any obligation to act on the advice others offer. At the end of the day, he says, if it all goes wrong, it's on you - and no one else is coming to dig you out. That's level of accountability, and the willingness to take risks and own the outcome, is what’s helped him build Tidal into a high-growth business from the ground up.
