Constructing
Growth
Working draft — awaiting editorial reviewMost businesses that feel stuck are not short of work. They are losing it in five predictable places, and the order you fix them in decides whether the fix pays.
Every growth review we run starts with the same question: where is the business already losing money it has earned? Not the marketing it hasn't done or the product it hasn't built — the enquiries, hours and margin that are being lost right now, between things that already exist. It is almost always in five places, and they are almost always in this order.
Someone found you, filled in a form or sent an email, and then nothing happened for a day and a half because the enquiry landed in an inbox that was busy. The person who enquired has usually spoken to somebody else by then. This is the cheapest leak to fix and the most common: every enquiry should land somewhere with a source attached and a follow-up that starts without anyone remembering to start it.
A quote went out. Nobody replied. Nobody followed up, because following up feels like nagging and there was other work to do. A sequence of two or three short, plain messages over ten days, sent by the system, recovers work that was already most of the way to won.
The customer's details go into the quote, then into the job sheet, then into the invoice. Each retyping costs minutes and introduces a chance to get it wrong. Across a year, a team of five can lose weeks to this — and the errors turn into credit notes and phone calls. Connecting the systems so a fact is entered once is unglamorous and pays every day.
Traffic is arriving, from search or referrals or the van, and it is bouncing — because the site is slow, or looks five years older than the business, or asks for a phone call when the visitor wanted a price. Conversion is usually the cheapest growth available: doubling the rate at which visitors become enquiries has the same effect as doubling the traffic, and it costs a fraction as much.
Sales has one figure, the accounts have another, and the owner has a feeling. Decisions get made on the feeling. When the systems agree and one screen shows what is actually happening — enquiries, conversion, jobs, cash — the arguments get shorter and the decisions get better.
Not the biggest. The fastest to pay back. The rule we use is frequency times time times error cost: how often it happens, how long it takes, and what it costs when it goes wrong. Ranked that way, the first fix is usually the follow-up (leak one or two), because it costs days to build and returns work that was already nearly won. The last is usually the dashboard, because it only pays once the data feeding it is clean.