The Revenue Review · method and sources

How we get to the number, step by step.

Here is how a business operations audit works when what you buy is a number rather than a workshop: four stages over two weeks, one input and one document per stage, every third-party figure linked, and a plain statement of what we cannot prove yet.

Book the 20-minute call

Or call +1 (202) 600-6027 — a person answers.

The four stages

Each stage takes one input and leaves one document behind.

We are not documenting what should happen. We are documenting what does happen. The gap between the two is where the money leaks — and the audit produces root causes, not symptoms.

The baseline session

What it needs: An hour with you, plus eight baseline numbers — estimates accepted, because the Review exists to replace estimates with counts.

What it produces: A same-day written summary: what we heard, the numbers we set, what we look at next.

The records read

What it needs: Read-only access to whatever touches an inquiry — CRM, booking tool, shared inbox — and the last twelve months of records.

What it produces: The leak, priced line by line from your own data, with the customer journey mapped against it.

The deep dive

What it needs: Up to three short team interviews. You brief your team before we speak to anyone.

What it produces: The Operating Scorecard, scored across all six dimensions, with the evidence behind each score.

The readout

What it needs: One working session with the person who decides.

What it produces: The executive report and the 90-day plan — two of the nine documents listed on the Review page.

The eight numbers we baseline in the first session: monthly new customers · monthly returning customers · no-show rate · average transaction value · lead response time · average time between purchases · active database size · monthly revenue.

One mechanic carries the whole engagement: after every working session, a written summary lands the same day — what we heard, the numbers we set, what we look at next. It reads like admin. It is actually the method: if a figure is wrong, you catch it the day it was set, not at the readout, and if expectations ever drift, the record does not.

That is the whole engagement — two weeks, four stages, one document per stage. The full list of the nine documents, the price and who it is not for live on the two-week audit’s own page.

Where every figure comes from

Four kinds of numbers. There is no fifth.

We never tell you what the problem costs. We ask for your figures and do the arithmetic where you can watch it happen. A number someone hands you is a pitch; a number computed from your own records is evidence. That is why the calculator asks you to type, and why the Review counts records instead of quoting industry averages.

The kind	Where it comes from	How you check it
Your number	You typed it — into the Leak Calculator, or across the table in a working session.	Change the input. The figure follows.
A cited statistic	A third party published it. Author, publication and year are printed beside it, with a live link.	Follow the link and read the source.
Our own measurement	We counted it in our own records, and the method is stated next to the count.	Ask how it was counted. The method travels with the number.
A labeled assumption	A number we chose to show the shape of a calculation — and said so, in writing, where it appears.	Replace it with yours. Every assumption sits in an editable field or carries its label in the text.

Your number

You typed it — into the Leak Calculator, or across the table in a working session.

Check it: Change the input. The figure follows.

A cited statistic

A third party published it. Author, publication and year are printed beside it, with a live link.

Check it: Follow the link and read the source.

Our own measurement

We counted it in our own records, and the method is stated next to the count.

Check it: Ask how it was counted. The method travels with the number.

A labeled assumption

A number we chose to show the shape of a calculation — and said so, in writing, where it appears.

Check it: Replace it with yours. Every assumption sits in an editable field or carries its label in the text.

The headline figure — what a year of unanswered inquiries is worth — is one multiplication, printed in full where you use it:

inquiries a month × twelve months × the share never followed up × your close rate × average customer value = what leaves in a year

The defaults you first see in the calculator are the fourth kind — assumptions we chose and labeled, each in an editable field. The output becomes the first kind the moment you type. Put your own four numbers in.

Every figure on this page is either yours or attributed below. We publish no number we cannot attribute.

Numbers we cite from others

Two citations carry every third-party claim on this site.

Both are named, dated and linked, and both were read against the original before publishing — a garbled citation is worse than none. Where a claim floating around our industry cannot be attributed, we cut it. That rule has deleted more copy from this site than it has kept.

What slow follow-up costs

In an audit of 2,241 US companies, the average first response to a web-generated lead took 42 hours, and 23% of companies never responded at all. Companies that tried to contact a lead within the hour were nearly 7× as likely to qualify it as those that tried an hour later — and more than 60× as likely as those that waited a day or longer.

James B. Oldroyd, Kristina McElheran and David Elkington, “The Short Life of Online Sales Leads,” Harvard Business Review, March 2011 · hbr.org

Why minutes matter

Move the first call from five minutes after the inquiry to thirty, and the odds of qualifying the prospect fall 21-fold. The steepest drop is inside the first ten minutes.

James B. Oldroyd, the Lead Response Management study, 2007 · leadresponsemanagement.org

What we take from both: speed is a property of the system that answers, not of the person who means to. Neither figure is about your business — that is what the Review measures.

Measured on ourselves

We ran the same audit on ourselves. Here is what it caught.

We put our own outbound calling through the same six dimensions we sell. Every dial sits in our own CRM, and the readout keeps three counts: dials placed, calls that ended “not interested,” calls that reached an owner. Almost every dial ended without a conversation — and the failure was not the pitch. It was everything around it: who was called, when, and what happened after nobody answered.

The exact counts are the third kind of number on this page, so they are held to the third kind’s rule: generated from the call records, never typed from memory. Until that export runs on a schedule, this section ships without the figure — on the page that explains our method, an untraceable number would be the most expensive sentence we could print.

What the reading changed: our reps now pass a nine-module sales course before they may dial, and the gate is hard — no course, no calls. Our own paid advertising went through the same treatment after we watched budget burn on a single fatigued creative; every campaign now has a named owner, a daily check and a written stop rule.

And the bridge to everything else on this site: the cheapest customer to reach is the one who already called you once — and in most companies we look at, nobody ever calls them back.

If you go on to build with us

The plan is ordered by rules, not preferences.

The 90-day plan in the report is sequenced the same way whether your own team runs it or we do. Four rules we don’t break:

Capture before you acquire.
Revenue you already paid to generate is recovered before new demand is bought. Fix the bucket before filling it.
Gaps before pipeline.
Broken hand-offs get fixed before anything new is built on top of them.
Reviews and referrals before paid acquisition.
The cheapest demand is the demand your existing customers can send you.
Dashboards last.
Visibility pays off once the systems it watches exist — a dashboard over a broken process is a scoreboard for losing.

If you then build with us, delivery runs in five phases:

01
Audit. Current process, tools and data mapped; the top bottlenecks written down as root causes; scope signed off in writing.
02
Design. Architecture and tool choices you approve on paper before a single platform is configured. Any change after sign-off is a written change order.
03
Build. Inside your existing tools wherever possible, in your terminology, tested against real scenarios, documentation written as we build.
04
Adoption. Live training plus short video walkthroughs. Support starts here, not at the end.
05
Measure and hand over. The same numbers re-measured, the before-and-after in writing, and a handoff pack: what was built, how to test it, what to do if it breaks.

We build in your existing tools wherever possible. If your stack genuinely cannot do it, we say so before you sign — replacing software adds time and money, and we would rather tell you that now than have you discover it in week four.

Every build ends with measurement, not a hand-wave: we re-score the dimension on the Operating Scorecard and put the before-and-after in writing. If it has not moved enough, we refine before we advance. And we run at most two builds at once — a documented internal rule, not a marketing line, and the reason the delivery window holds.

What that costs: systems built after the Review run $5,500–$8,500 each, scoped in the Review itself; ongoing advisory, if you want us to stay past the handoff, is $2,000 a month. Neither is required. The report is written to be run without us.

What we cannot prove

No client case studies yet. Here is what that means.

“I don’t know enough yet to say” is the most credible sentence in week one, and you will hear us use it. We don’t guess ahead of your data: no projected returns before the readout, no benchmark dressed up as your number, no finding without the records behind it.

We have no client case studies to publish yet — none. Every firm was new once; most say it with borrowed logos and anonymous quote cards. We would rather say it in plain text: results will appear here when a client agrees to publish theirs with their name on it, and not a day before.

What we can show you now is the instrument itself: the Leak Calculator and the full Operating Scorecard, both free on this site. A complete sample report — an example business, every input labeled as invented, the arithmetic shown in full — is in preparation and will be published here, ungated, no email wall.

Two more things you will not see us manufacture: urgency and scarcity. No discount with a clock on it, no invented spot counts. If we ever say capacity is limited, it is because two builds at once is the documented ceiling.

If the evidence says your leak is a $200-a-month answering-service problem and not a project, the report says exactly that — and we stop.

The next step

Twenty minutes. Your figures. The same four kinds of numbers.

On the 20-minute call we walk your situation against the method on this page and give you a straight answer — including “the Review is premature,” if that is the truth.

Book the 20-minute call +1 (202) 600-6027