Every business is stuck on one thing. Sometimes it is being found. Often it is what happens after: enquiries that die, systems held together by one person, customers who come once. We survey the business, name the constraint, and build the fix.
Before we propose anything, we survey: how customers actually find you today, what they ask in the ninety seconds before they buy, where enquiries go quiet, and what your team can realistically run on a Tuesday afternoon.
The solution is a consequence of the plot. Two restaurants on the same street get different builds, because one is losing people at discovery and the other is losing them at the third visit.
Before anything gets clever, the base has to hold: somewhere to send people that loads on a weak connection, a way to capture and answer enquiries that does not cost you your evenings, and numbers you can actually see without asking anyone.
Most of what gets sold to small businesses skips this and starts at the top of the funnel. That is why it stops working the month the spend stops.
They never found you. Search, maps, social, the places people actually look before they choose.
They found you and left. Slow replies, no booking, no follow up, no reason to come back.
They came back once. Nothing captured them, so the second visit never turned into a habit.
Almost everyone buys door one while the other two hang open. That is how budgets disappear. The survey tells us which door is leaking, and we build that one first.
Busy at lunch, empty by the third week of the month.
The constraint was not traffic. Regulars had no reason to be regulars, and nothing captured them when they left.
Built: A loyalty layer they could actually run from the counter.
Scouts were watching, and none of it was landing anywhere.
The constraint was not visibility. What they saw in the field had nowhere to be filed, so it lived in phones and got lost.
Built: An intake and scouting portal, then the public side on top of it.
Enquiries came in, went quiet and never came back.
The constraint was not lead generation. Nothing held a buyer over the months a decision that size takes.
Built: A nurture system built around a long, slow, expensive yes.
Hard to find, easy to leave, no reason to return.
This one was all three doors at the same time, which is rarer than it sounds, and the order mattered more than the list.
Built: Discovery first, then conversion, then the reason to come back.
In three of these four, the thing costing the most money was not the thing we were called about. That is the whole reason we survey before we quote, and the reason the first conversation is free.
We take on a small number of partners at a time. When we say yes, it is because the survey showed us a door we are confident we can open, and we would rather turn down work than take money for a build that will not move anything.
Risk reversal is baked in for every partner, structured to your context: a trial build before commitment, staged payments against delivered work, or terms tied to the numbers we agreed. Which one depends on the plot.
On a few builds we carry the whole cost ourselves and take a share of the upside instead. That only works where the growth is measurable and we can see the path to it, so it is something we offer rather than something you ask for, and we offer it rarely.
If you want someone to post three times a week, or a website by Friday, or you are not ready to change how the business actually runs, we are the wrong build and we will say so on the first call. And we do not measure success in likes. We agree upfront what moves the needle, bookings, enquiries answered, repeat orders, covers on a Tuesday, and that is the number both of us look at.
It depends what the survey finds, because a loyalty layer and a full rebuild are not the same job. What is fixed is that you see a costed scope before anything starts, and you never get an invoice for something we did not agree.
Sometimes. On a few builds we carry the whole cost and take a share of the upside instead. It only works where the growth is measurable and we can see the path to it, so we offer it rather than advertise it.
The survey decides. We look at how customers find you, what they ask before they buy, where enquiries go quiet and what your team can realistically run. Then we build the one thing that is costing you the most.
That is common, and finding it is the job. Half the time the leak sits somewhere the owner was not looking. We will tell you what we found even if it is not what you came to us for.
On the number we agreed before starting. Bookings, enquiries answered, repeat orders, covers on a Tuesday. Not impressions, not follower counts, and not a monthly report of them.
The build lands in weeks, not quarters. Whether the numbers move that fast depends on the constraint: an unanswered enquiry problem shifts almost immediately, visibility compounds more slowly.
Then we would want to know what they are doing before we propose anything. Sometimes the honest answer is that you do not need us, and we would rather say that than sell around it.
You do not have to be right about it. Half the time the constraint sits somewhere the owner was not looking, and finding that is the job. Every application is read, and where the plot suits what we build, we answer within a week with a first read of the survey, whether or not we end up working together.