Time Leak Audit
I map how the work happens today, estimate the hours that could be recovered and rank the opportunities against your goals. Under two hours of your time.
From £950 · fixed fee · excluding VATAutomate CRM & relationship follow up
Your next clients are already
in your contacts.
The problem is almost never a shortage of contacts. It is knowing which of them should hear from you this week.
At a glance
- The task
- Keeping useful relationships warm and followed up
- Who it hits
- Anyone whose new business comes through referral and reputation
- What changes
- Records brought together, a next action on each one, due follow ups in one view
- Proof
- A founder led recruitment firm in London, see below
The problem
Why good relationships quietly go cold
You meet someone useful. You mean to follow up. You do, once. Then a busy fortnight happens, and the thread drops. Nobody decides to drop it. It simply stops being followed.
That is what makes it so hard to see. A relationship going cold never appears on a report. There is no line in the accounts for the introduction that did not happen. The loss is real and completely invisible.
Meanwhile the information exists, scattered: a spreadsheet, an inbox, a notebook, and one person’s memory. To find out where anything stands, somebody has to ask.
A relationship that goes cold never shows up as a loss.
The change
What it looks like before,
and after
Today, by hand
- Contacts live across a spreadsheet, email and one person’s notes
- Nobody can see which relationships are moving and which have stalled
- Follow up depends on somebody remembering at the right moment
- Every contact gets the same attention, or none at all
- You have to ask your team where things stand
- Nobody can say which contacts actually brought in business
Once it runs itself
- One record for each relationship, with its history attached
- A daily view of the relationships that need attention now
- Every relationship carries an owner and a next action with a date
- Priority levels, so the most valuable relationships get the closest attention
- Recording what happened updates the dates and sets the next reminder
- Reports that show who introduces what, from first contact through to revenue
713 of 1,018relationships in progress had no next step planned
Founder led recruitment firm · London
2,311 professional relationships that could bring in new business, managed across a spreadsheet, email and one person’s notes. None of them ranked by priority. The work introduced three priority tiers and turned the records into something the team reads every morning.
Read the case studyHow we get there
Three paid phases.
You decide after each one.
This one usually starts with a cleanup. The records exist, but they have to be trustworthy before anything can be built on top of them.
Process Design
A working session with your team, then detailed mapping: the steps, the data, the business rules and the exceptions that decide how the build behaves.
Separately scoped · fixed fee · excluding VATImplementation and handover
I build it in the tools you already use, test it against the agreed scenarios, document it and show your team how to run it without me.
Fixed project price · quoted after Process DesignBefore any of it, a free fifteen minute conversation. Bring the process as it actually happens, not as it should.
Will this send automated messages to my contacts?
Not unless you ask for that, and I would usually argue against it for relationship follow up. Referral relationships are personal, and a generic sequence damages them. What gets automated is the part that decides who you should contact and when, and the recording of what happened. The message itself stays yours.
Our data is a mess. Is it too early?
It is almost always a mess, and that is part of the job rather than a reason to wait. The recruitment firm above had 2,311 records across several places. Bringing them together and agreeing what a good record looks like is usually the first phase of the work.
We already have a CRM and nobody uses it.
That is the most common version of this problem. A CRM people avoid is usually one that asks for more than it gives back. The fix is to reduce what a person has to type and increase what the system returns: a daily list worth opening, updates that happen as a side effect of recording a conversation.
How do you decide which relationships matter most?
You do. I bring a structure, usually a small number of priority tiers with a different follow up rhythm for each, and you decide which relationships sit where. The judgement about who matters is commercial, so it belongs with you.
Can we see where our business actually comes from?
Yes, and this is often the part clients value most. If every relationship records who introduced it, the reports can show which people and which groups bring in new relationships, leads and revenue. That usually changes where the team spends its time.
Keep reading
Related
Your business
Who should hear from you this week?
If the answer needs a conversation with three people and a spreadsheet, there is something worth fixing.
15 minutes · No charge
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