One page, one crest, and whatever needed doing.

Botan did not start it. The shop opened in 2009 and he took it over in 2011 — on a credit card, at a price he considered a steal. The menu advertised a million combinations; the shop was keeping about five ingredients behind the counter and opening when it suited. He stocked what the menu promised and opened when the sign said it would open. Turnover rose roughly sevenfold inside a week.

No refit, no relaunch, no money spent on marketing. Reliable hours and the stock to serve what was already being advertised. The business had simply been promising something it was not delivering. That gap is the thing the Group still looks for.

One Direction adopted the shop during their X Factor years. It put a One Direction milkshake on the menu, personally endorsed by members of the band, and a hall of fame on the wall, and it became a destination — fans travelled to a parade of shops on Woodhouse Road, N12, to drink a milkshake because five boys from a talent show had drunk one there.

Arsenal players came. So did JLS, Union J and Girls Aloud. The shop trended worldwide on Twitter more than once. A clothing line made with Benjart, the London streetwear label, sold out in a day after One Direction wore it and promoted it themselves, unprompted and unpaid, with no arrangement of any kind.

On 23 November 2013 it featured in 1D Day, the band’s seven-hour global livestream. In April 2015 EA took the shop over with Union J to launch The Sims 4: Get to Work, a game about running your own business, filmed in a business he was running.

It grew to 5 shops — Hampstead, North Finchley, Finchley Central, Friern Barnet and East Barnet, with the flagship in Hampstead.

The client list ran to names most people would recognise from television, music, film and football. They are not named here. Discretion is most of what a VIP service is actually selling.

The launderette in North Finchley was the first shop Botan ever took on, and it is still running today under Mums Laundry: a launderette and dry cleaning receiver shop, with some of the same clients. The chain has gone. The first shop has not.

This one is still going. Started in 2008, it is still the operating business at the centre of the Group: the same trade, described in the same terms, 17 years later.

Everything else on this page closed, sold or ran its course. This is the thread that held.

Not all of it was small business work. A good deal of it was in Belgravia, for one client with several flats there, and in Notting Hill and Ladbroke Grove, where a private client engaged The Tech Nerds at one address and again at a second after moving. The work followed the client rather than the building.

Being trusted inside houses like that, at that age, taught the thing every later business ran on: people do not re-engage you because the work was cheap. They re-engage you because they did not have to check it.

It grew well past contract cleaning. Waterfall took a 3,000 square foot industrial unit fitted with commercial dry-cleaning and laundry machinery, and ran trade processing for more than 30 dry-cleaning shops across London and Hertfordshire, competitors among them — alongside daily contract cleaning for offices and commercial premises.

That is the whole lesson of the Group in one move. The margin was not in the shopfront. It was in owning the plant everybody else had to send their work to, and in buying at a scale nobody on a single high street could match.