I think you are setting the benchmark way too high. For most carpet cleaners I'm sure what Mark does will suffice. As I have said, you don't need a sledgehammer to crack a nut.
Are you still there Angelo?
What you need is more or less dependent on what terms/areas you want to rank for. It would vary tremendously between say your existing area Market Harborough and say, Edinburgh (which would need a lot of promotional work).
Mark's sites work well because they are targeted at smaller markets with lower competition (e.g. Colin's Falmouth site) and have reasonable on-site SEO. He has never tried to say they are the epitome of on-page SEO.
As Tony said, you won't rank for "Prada Handbags" like this.
If your new area is not London or Edinburgh, then one of these sites should be fine. At £ 200 odd it's the cost of one small newspaper ad and is there for a lot longer
I'm going to disagree slightly with Gary and Adam and say that Mark's sites probably rank as a result of their on page factors rather than that dumb linking network. Why?
Search engines are looking for evidence of natural, varied linking over time. 150 + backlinks with identical anchor text, from the same class C IP addresses is NOT natural.
Even then you won't really get penalised as search engines accept that you have no control over incoming links. The search engines will just ignore (not count) them.
Where the problem comes is when you link out (to them). In the search engines' eyes, you have now willingly joined the network and as site owner are as guilty as the rest.
Imagine if a competitor complains to say, Google about your site, what will a manual reviewer think when they see all those reciprocal links? Try explaining that one away.