Starting from the bottom
After joining PRO-SEC as a seasonal Technician Assistant during his university years, Patrick Sévigny developed his entrepreneurial spirit and chose to pursue his career there. Twenty years later, he is heading up a successful SME.
Founded in 1993, PRO-SEC offers a wide range of dry cleaning services for carpets and furniture to its residential and commercial/condominium clientele in the Montreal, South Shore and Laval area. The team uses a unique, shampoo-free process, developed exclusively for their needs, to effectively remove encrusted, rebellious stains and odors. PRO-SEC also offers its own range of biodegradable products developed with researchers which significantly reduce the risk of bacteria proliferation.
From Yellow Pages to Google SEO
In 2005, Patrick created the company’s first website using Flash and registered the domain name www.nettoyage-tapis-pro-sec.ca. This step was necessary in order to acquire more customers at a time when the Yellow Pages no longer met his needs and more and more people were going to look for this type of service directly online. “In the past, we would put an ad in the Yellow Pages and automatically the phone would ring. But since 2000, this has been less and less true, because the web has replaced what the Yellow Pages were bringing,” he explains.
Four versions and two registered domain names later, the site: www.pro-sec.ca was updated at the end of 2019 for ease, accessibility and conversion of visitors into customers. The results speak for themselves: the number of visitors has tripled since the implementation of the new site.
Patrick decided to trust the registrar, Web Hosting Canada to meet his expectations because the servers are located in Montreal: “We are also a Montreal company, so I wanted to support another local business given their expertise and reputation.” On this new site, customers have more information about the company even before the first phone conversation or meeting on their premises, with articles, photos, and videos detailing the cleaning procedure. From now on, the website address is proudly affixed to the trucks and on the brand maintenance products.
A journey full of lessons
After more than 20 years in the industry, Patrick has learned a lot about advertising and his industry so he takes the opportunity to share his experience with his employees through training and advice whenever he can. He offers the advice to young entrepreneurs: “If you think that you can just put a site online and that there is nothing else to do, that you have done your job, that’s not it at all! Every day, every week, every month there is work to be done. It’s a lot of time and a lot of energy to keep up to date, but once the site is launched you can’t wait for people to come to you, you have to keep feeding it with content.”
