The founder of a Norfolk start-up business is hoping to clean up by expanding into Suffolk.

Sam Cordner set up East Anglia Cleaning and Maintenance about 18 months ago investing nearly £2,000 in specialist gutter cleaning equipment.

The 27-year-old took on his friend Danny Sayer, and the pair set up cleaning gutters and homes around North Norfolk.

Since then, the business has secured work in Norwich and Great Yarmouth, and now Mr Cordner, from Marsham, near Aylsham, is hoping to win work across the border.

With a limited budget to spend on advertising and marketing, he said he had relied largely on word of mouth to win new work.

However, he had recently promoted the company through the Tickles website, which is owned by EDP publishers Archant, and he was also working on developing a website.

'It's a big market because people want it done, but a lot of people haven't physically got the ladders,' Mr Cordner said.

'I already had the van, it was just a case of buying the equipment,' he said. 'It's basically a very large vacuum cleaner, which we can run from the mains or from an adapter.

'We have got telescopic poles and can go up to four storeys comfortably and there's a camera at the top of the pole.

'We did go down the window cleaning side and we do outside maintenance but we want to emphasise this part of the business.'

Mr Cordner, whose father, Stephen, used to run Corton's Electrical in Aylsham before selling the business, admitted that the recent cold weather had seen work dry up but with spring just around the corner he was confident that the business would resume its growth.

'I like the self-employed lifestyle,' he said.

'This year we want to branch out into Suffolk and get a bigger van.

'We get a lot of jobs by turning up at somebody's house, and the neighbour comes out and asks us to do their gutters too. The best result we had was doing four houses in a row, when three had asked us if we could do theirs.'

Tell us about your start-up business. Contact Shaun Lowthorpe on 01603 772471 or email shaun.lowthorpe@archant.co.uk