Dave,
I think you are making a very serious mistake by going the Dry and LM only route. LM and the Dry Compound system are one of many systems you should have at your disposal to clean customers carpets. By narrowing down the system you have you are also narrowing down your market and that in my view is a suicidal move for a fledgling business such as yours.
You've got to learn to think about carpet cleaning from a customers perspective and given them what they want instead of what you want them to have.
From reading your posts you seem to have had one bad experience with HWE and knee jerked into the Dry / LM route as a consequence of that. You cannot run a successful business on a wing and a prayer. The change to Dry / Lm should have been the consequence of thorough market research not just an impulse.
You are in the North East, one of the toughest areas in the country, trust me you will need every edge you can muster simply to survive, without cutting out the most popular carpet cleaning system on the planet.
Sorry to be so brutal, I just think you need a reality check.
Simon
Hi Simon,
Thanks for the advice (I mean that genuinely not curtly) but it's not what I'm seeing in my business model, with my customers, in my region. I've built up a strong word of mouth reputation on VLM (and more recently LM) and you have to also consider that my business model is not typical 'cc' ...... what I've not yet referred to since joining the forum , is the fact that 40% of my business is currently Oven Valeting! I used to have a seperate website for this:- www.ovenzest.co.uk but I have now combined both the carpetzest and ovenzest websites into one 'eco/green' cleaning proposition, with both domains pointing to the same website (work in progress). My Oven Cleaning is 100% eco so the VLM sits alongside that proposition. HWE just doesn't sit well in my eco and low moisture proposition; to reinforce this, I'll shock you even more by saying that as from August I am no longer doing fabric upholstery cleaning!! This is because having tried ARIDEX etc I have been unable to find a convincing low moisture solution to upholstery cleaning. I don't want to advertise all of my services being eco / low moisture and then have a page on upholstery cleaning that uses HWE. So I appreciate I am in a very different market to most but my services from August will be; VLM and LM 'natural' carpet cleaning, Eco Oven Valeting, Leather Suite Cleaning, Hard Floors, and Property Deep Clean / EOT. That's it.

Cheers,
Dave.
PS.... I can understand how some of my posts may have made it appear that I was departing from HWE on a knee-jerk but that's really not the case.
PPS..... When Gav was up yesterday to pick up the Extracta, he brought me along a 'Bone-Dry' flyer that came through his door, to look at. I called them and asked how quickly they could do 4 bedrooms, lounge and dining room. The earliest they could visit for the survey was a week tomorrow and they couldn't do the clean until not this weekend but the one after..... sounds like they're doing ok with VLM in the North East!