The challenge
Tank Clad Ltd has spent over twenty years lining and cladding tanks and buildings for industrial and agricultural clients: bund lining, secondary containment, concrete repairs, industrial roofing, and the specialist work around anaerobic digestion and wastewater plant.
Much of what that work requires, the trades, the access equipment, the experience of working on live commercial premises, also covers industrial building maintenance and repair. Expanding into it was a natural step rather than a leap into something unfamiliar. IBM&R, Industrial Building Maintenance & Repair Ltd, was set up to do exactly that.
The question was where the new business should live online, and the obvious answer was the wrong one.
Tanking and cladding and building maintenance are two different pitches to two different client bases. A company that has had a digester relined is not, by virtue of that, in the market for a maintenance contract on its factory. The two buyers are often different people in different departments with different budgets.
The direction that matters more is the other one. A facilities manager sourcing building maintenance who lands on a website called Tank Clad has to stop and work out whether they are in the right place. Most will not spend long on that. They will go back to the results and pick a company whose website says plainly what it does. Every enquiry lost that way is lost silently, which is what makes it easy to underestimate.
So the new business needed its own name, its own domain, and its own pitch. What it did not need was to look as though it had appeared from nowhere with no track record behind it.
The approach
Two websites, deliberately. Not a section on the existing site, not a sub-brand landing page. A facilities manager searching for building maintenance needed to find a building maintenance company, with a name and a site that confirmed it within a second of landing.
A shared visual language. The design and branding were repurposed from Tank Clad's site rather than started fresh. The two sites are recognisably related, which does two useful things at once. It signals that IBM&R is backed by an established operation rather than being a new name with nothing behind it. And it means a customer who moves between the two sees a group, not a coincidence.
This is the part of the decision worth noticing: the businesses are separated where separation helps, in the name, the domain, and the pitch, and joined where connection helps, in the look and the cross-referencing. Splitting a brand is not all or nothing.
The same platform. WordPress with the Divi builder, matching the sister site. One set of skills maintains both, an update learned on one transfers straight to the other, and nobody has to remember which system they are working in. Where a shared platform is the right answer, it is worth saying so plainly rather than reaching for something newer.
Built around maintenance contracts. Much of IBM&R's work is contracted maintenance rather than one-off call-outs, and the value in that arrangement is knowing a building before anything goes wrong. When something does fail, the response is quicker because the building is already understood. The site is written to make that case rather than to sell individual repairs. [CONFIRM: that this reflects how the site is actually structured, and adjust if not]
Pointing both ways. Each site references the other. Splitting them was about being findable under the right name, not about hiding that these are one group with a wider capability than either site shows on its own.
The outcome
IBM&R launched with its own name, its own domain, and a homepage that says what the business does in the first line. Someone sourcing industrial building maintenance now finds a company that calls itself exactly that, instead of having to work out whether a tanking specialist also covers their building.
Because the design carried over from Tank Clad, it did not launch looking like a standing start. The site reads as part of an established operation, which is accurate rather than flattering: the trades, the access equipment, and twenty years of working on live industrial premises were all in place on day one. A new company with a new name usually has to earn that impression over a year or two. This one had it from the first visit.
For the group, two sites mean two pitches that do not blunt each other. Tank Clad's site still does one job for one buyer, properly, and the newer business is not competing for room on it. Both sit on the same platform, so both are maintained by the same person, with no second system to learn and no decision about which one an update belongs in.
There are no traffic or enquiry figures to quote here. IBM&R is a new business rather than a rebuild, so there is no earlier version to measure it against. We would rather say that than reach for a number that does not mean anything.
Tech stack
Built on WordPress with the Divi builder, matching Tank Clad's site so both can be updated by the same people without learning a second system. Hosting is ours: managed WordPress on UK servers, with LiteSpeed caching, daily backups on thirty-day restore points, free SSL, security monitoring, and core and plugin updates handled rather than left to the client to remember. The first year is included with the build, as it is on every project.
