You do not need a consultant to work out where a small business is leaking. You need twenty minutes, your inbox, and your bank feed. Here is the order to do it in, and what each answer means.
1. Count last month’s enquiries
Open every channel work arrives through. The website, the phone, the business email, the social accounts, and whatever your referrers use. Count how many separate people got in touch last month.
Now count how many of those exist anywhere other than the place they arrived. Not “I remember them”, not “it is in my head”. Written down, in one place, with a next step.
If the second number is smaller than the first, you have a funnel problem, and it is almost certainly your most expensive one.
2. Find your slowest reply
Sort your enquiries by how long they waited for a first response. Look at the worst one.
Then ask what would have happened if the reply had gone out in four minutes instead. Speed of first reply is one of the few things that reliably decides who wins a quoted job. If your worst is measured in days, that is an inbox problem.
3. Check when your last five invoices went out
Compare the date the work finished with the date the invoice was raised. If the gap is more than a day or two, you are financing your customers for free, and the money you are waiting on is money you already earned.
That is a back office problem.
4. Search for yourself
Open a private browser window. Search the way a customer would: the service, then the suburb. Not your business name, which you will always rank for.
If you are not on the first page, and there is no page on your site about that suburb and that service, search has nothing to match. That is a demand problem, and it is the one most people try to fix first by buying ads.
5. Find the deadline you nearly missed
Registrations, insurances, certifications, lodgements. Think of the last one that nearly lapsed, or did.
If the only thing that saved it was somebody remembering, it will happen again.
6. Ask what you actually know each morning
Without opening anything, say out loud: what came in yesterday, what went out, what is late, and what needs you today.
If you cannot, that is a morning page problem, and it is why the other five are hard to see.
What to do with the answers
Fix them in this order: funnel, back office, inbox, front door, demand, morning page. Demand goes last, not first. Buying more enquiries before you can hold on to the ones you have is the most common and most expensive mistake in small business marketing.
If you want the whole set done at once, that is what the three week install is. If you would rather do it yourself, the playbooks are being written for exactly that.
