Half the work comes from referral. Nobody can describe what you do.

The largest source of new business in most professional firms is also the least managed, and the reason is usually a single missing sentence.

By Steve 5 min read
Abstract bridge artwork for Half the work comes from referral. Nobody can describe what you do.

Ask an owner-managed professional firm where its work comes from and referral is almost always the largest single answer. Ask the same firm what its referrers actually say, word for word, and the room goes quiet. The channel that produces the most revenue is the one nobody has ever specified. This is not a marketing oversight so much as a category error. Referral is treated as a by-product of doing good work: something that happens to you rather than something with a mechanism. But it does have a mechanism, and…

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