Leadership
The founder was away for three weeks. Nothing broke. Nothing moved either.
Surviving the owner's holiday proves less than most businesses think it does, and the thing it fails to prove is the one buyers pay for.
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Growth strategy
Half the new business came from referrals. Nobody’s job includes it.
The cheapest, highest-converting channel in most service businesses is also the only one with no owner, no budget and no…
Operations
The board pack runs to twenty pages. Nothing in it has changed a decision.
Most management reporting grows by accretion, and the test that would prune it is a single question almost nobody asks…
Operations
The target was hit every month last year. That is the finding.
A metric that never misses is carrying information, just not the information the dashboard implies. On reading variance instead of…
Marketing
The rating is 4.8. Every one-star review says the same thing.
Most businesses manage the average review score. The information a prospect actually uses, and the defect log a business could…
Growth strategy
The top rep converts at twice the team average. They also pick their own leads.
A conversion rate is a ratio, and in most sales teams the person being measured controls the denominator. That changes…
Pricing
The quote has three options. Everyone picks the middle one.
Tiered pricing is meant to let buyers sort themselves. When every buyer sorts the same way, the tiers are doing…
Operations
The team is at capacity. A third of the hours are the second attempt.
Rework almost never appears as a cost line. It appears as a hiring request, and the two are remarkably easy…
Growth strategy
The pipeline is £2m. Eighty per cent of it hasn’t moved in ninety days.
A large pipeline can be the most reassuring number in a business and the least informative. The difference lies in…
Pricing
The line loses money on the P&L. Closing it removes almost no cost.
Allocated overhead makes some of the healthiest work in a business look like a liability, and the decision that usually…
Take it further
This is the general pattern. Your business is the specific case.
Everything here is free to read with an account, and always will be. What it cannot do is tell you which of these applies to your numbers, your market and your constraints. That is the work we do with clients.