Where businesses lose value
Nine questions. See whether revenue, capacity or control is leaking most.
Find your biggest leak
Nine questions, three on each of revenue, capacity and control. Answer for how things run on a normal week.
Revenue
When an inquiry arrives, how long before a person replies?
What happens to a lead that goes quiet?
Do you know which channel produced your last ten customers?
Capacity
How much of the working week goes to work that repeats?
When work moves between people, how does the next person know?
If your busiest person took two weeks off, what would stop?
Visibility and control
Where does the number you trust live?
How many systems hold part of the customer picture?
Who owns recurring obligations, filings and renewals?
Where the value is going
Answer the nine questions
Each section scores out of nine. A lower score means more value is escaping there.
A second opinion
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What this usually leads to
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Value leaks three ways: money earned and never collected, people doing work a system should, and a business nobody can see without asking. Nine questions show which leak to fix first.
What you get
Revenue
Inquiries answered slowly, leads that go quiet, and data nobody reads.
Capacity
Work that repeats, steps done by hand, and handoffs where things sit waiting for a person.
Visibility and control
Information split across systems, numbers nobody quite trusts, obligations nobody owns.
What stays human
Judgment, exceptions and anything where being confidently wrong is expensive.
Why the order matters more than the answer
Ask a leadership team where the business is losing money and you get three confident answers that contradict each other. Sales says the leads are poor. Operations says there are not enough people. Finance says the numbers arrive too late to act on. All three are describing the same problem from different ends, and none of them can prove it.
The first place value escapes is revenue, and it escapes before anyone sees it. An inquiry that waits a day for a reply behaves completely differently from one answered in minutes. A lead that goes quiet and gets no second contact is gone. Neither shows up in any report, because a customer who never became a customer leaves no record. Businesses in this position usually go looking for more traffic, which multiplies a loss they have not measured.
The second is capacity, and it feels like needing another hire. Work that repeats, steps re-entered by hand, and handoffs where a task sits waiting for somebody to notice it. The waiting is usually the larger half and almost nobody counts it. Adding a person to a broken handoff makes the handoff more expensive and harder to see, which is why the same constraint reappears a quarter later one level higher.
The third is control, and nobody calls it a leak until it costs something. Information sits in several systems that disagree, and the number people act on is assembled by hand. Nobody owns the filings and the renewals until a letter arrives. So decisions land late, on figures nobody is quite sure of, and the cost shows up as the thing that was not done in time.
When capacity is the leak and all of it routes through one person, the next decision is whether that seat is fractional or full time. The same three leaks read differently to somebody buying the business, which is what preparing for a sale covers.
When capacity is the leak, hire or fix the system decides whether another person removes it.
Questions we get
Which of the three is usually the biggest?
It varies more than people expect, which is exactly why guessing is expensive. Businesses with strong demand and thin process usually leak capacity. Businesses with good delivery and weak follow up leak revenue. Businesses that grew through acquisition or fast hiring almost always leak control.
How do you measure a revenue leak?
With the inquiries you already receive rather than with a model. Time from arrival to a human reply, how many receive a second contact, and what share reach a defined next step. Three numbers, available within a week.
We think we just need more people. How do we check?
Log where the week goes for five days, at the moment the work happens rather than from memory. Then separate the time spent doing things from the time work spent waiting on somebody.
What counts as a control problem?
Not being able to answer a straightforward question about your own business without somebody working it out first. How many active customers, what the pipeline is worth, which obligations fall due next month.
More in the guides and every answer in one place.
Read next
Put a number on the leak, then decide what to do about it.
Shaheer leads the work, with engineers, writers, filers and analysts behind him. C-suite operations for a San Francisco AI company, Six Sigma on the process side, Anthropic certified on the Model Context Protocol, ten years across eight industries. See what we have built