Everyone has a theory
why revenue is short.

They can't all be right, and everyone checking has a stake in the answer. I establish the facts everyone can agree on.

I find out why the revenue number is what it is — and prove it. For companies between $10M and $100M.

Try the free readSee the method

What you end up with

Six weeks, and four things you don't have now — whether the number is behind or ahead.

1
The two or three things actually costing you money Not a list of twenty observations. The short list, in order, with everything else named and set aside.
2
A dollar figure on each one — or an honest refusal Every number traceable to your own records, so your finance team can check it rather than take it on faith.
3
A name against every fix Whose desk it sits on and what kind of problem it is — a setting, a habit, a missing process, or a decision only leadership can make.
4
A baseline you can measure against later Run the same exercise in six months and the improvement is measured rather than asserted.

Not short? This is still the question.

Everything above assumes the number is behind. Plenty of the companies who should be asking this are ahead — and they have a version of the same problem, which nobody is selling them a solution to.

  • If you don't know which lever produced the growth, you can't repeat it deliberately. You can only hope it happens again.
  • And you can't defend it. Whatever produced it can stop, and you won't see it stop until the quarter it matters.
  • The multiplication runs both ways. Small movements compound upward too — but push the lever that wasn't moving and you've spent a year and a budget on the wrong one.
  • Growth you don't keep isn't growth. If the first engine leaks, every dollar of new business fills a hole before it adds anything. A company buying growth without knowing its retention rate is buying growth it doesn't keep.

Everyone selling to a company that's winning is selling more pipeline. This is the other question.

The standard

Every finding is labeled by how far I'll stand behind it.

Three tiers, decided before I look at anything, so nobody is grading their own homework at the end.

VerifiableHard math from your own records. If you disagree, we open the document together and count.
A rangeReal, sized low to high. Never one flattering number where a range is the honest answer.
Not pricedGenuine, sometimes urgent — but any dollar figure would be invention, so I refuse to invent one.

About a third of what I find gets no dollar figure at all. That refusal is the reason you can believe the rest.

How it works

Three layers, in this order, every time — and the questions are the same whether the number is behind or ahead. A company that doesn't know which lever produced its growth can't repeat it, and can't protect it.

Layer one · Trust
Can we believe the numbers?

Nothing below this matters if the answer is soft. In most companies it takes days to answer a straightforward question about their own revenue, and two people come back with different answers.

Layer two · Analyze
Where does the number actually come from?

Two places: customers you already had, and customers you didn't. Different arithmetic, different owners, different speeds — and most companies review only the second.

RETAINCustomers you already had. Did they come back, and did they spend more or less than last time?
ADDCustomers you didn't have. How many chances you created, what they were worth, how often you won, and how long it took.

The levers inside each one multiply rather than add — which is how a year moves without any single number looking alarming enough to escalate. And if the first engine is close to empty, that is itself the finding: the whole number gets rebuilt from zero every year, and most companies in that position have never said it out loud.

Layer three · Grow
What moves the number, and can it land in time?

Two separate questions, and most plans fail on the second. Every finding arrives with a diagnosis that names the fix and the owner — configuration, enablement, process, or a management decision.

Why not just…

…bring in a consulting firm? A firm will put a number on everything, because a number sells and a caveat doesn't. I refuse to price about a third of what I find, and I tell you which third.
…have your own team do it? They could run the mechanics. But your operations lead built the system being examined, and asking anyone to find their own mistakes is hard — it isn't a character flaw. They also have a boss to protect and a budget to justify. I don't. That neutrality is most of what you're paying for.
…ask a software vendor? Their answer to all four kinds of problem is the same, and it's a license. I have nothing to sell you afterward. Implementation is a separate conversation you may never need — plenty of findings have owners already inside the building.

Try it before you talk to me

Here is the free read, in full. Ask your team for these twelve numbers, for this year and last. Then time it.

What you kept
  1. Revenue last year from customers you had at the start of last year
  2. What those same customers spent this year
  3. How many of them didn't come back at all
  4. Revenue this year from customers you didn't have last year
What you added
  1. New opportunities created
  2. What those opportunities were worth when they were created
  3. Deals won, and deals lost — closed only
  4. Revenue from the deals you won
  5. Median days from first contact to a win
  6. Median days from first contact to a loss
  7. Open pipeline you expect to close this period
  8. The number you're being held to

If it takes more than a week, or two people give you different answers, you've already found something — and you found it without me. That's genuinely a good outcome, and it's the reason I give this away.

Send me what comes back and I'll tell you what it says, at no charge. If it says nothing interesting, I'll tell you that too.

Send me your twelve numbers

Three ways to start

The readThe twelve numbers above. Whether your team can produce them is the first finding — and often the most useful one.
No fee
Revenue Time to AnswerBoth engines measured against last year, plus a facilitated session on what it actually took your team to answer one question about its own revenue.
$5,000
The diagnosticFull examination — systems, documents, people. Tiered findings, an owner on each, a 30-day and 90-day list, and a measured baseline you can re-run.
$19,000

The diagnostic is the deliverable — not a lead-in to a bigger project you didn't ask for. If the answer turns out to be product, delivery or a frozen market, I'll tell you inside the first two weeks and point you at someone better.

The book

Publishing this year

Silent Revenue Killers

Why companies lose money they never see leaving — and why capable people miss it. Most of what I find isn't hidden. It's unowned. Nobody's job is to notice that a price increase written into a contract never got invoiced.

Ask for an early copy — I'll send one before it's out, and tell you when it lands.

Next: Silent Wealth Killers — the same idea turned on personal decisions. Why we make bad choices with money and don't notice we're making them.

Speaking

Leadership teams, boards, and industry events. Practical rather than motivational — people leave with questions they can use on Monday. Forty-five minutes with questions, or a working session of half a day where the room runs the method on its own numbers. Taking first bookings now.

An answer stops the questions Why capable teams miss obvious money. The trap isn't ignorance — everyone already has an explanation, and satisfaction ends the inquiry three levels too early.
How long would it take you to answer one question? What a company learns about itself when it tries to answer a single question about its own revenue under a deadline.
Not hidden. Unowned. The money that leaves quietly, why nobody stops it, and what changes when a name gets attached to it.

Who I am

I've spent twenty years on every side of the revenue question. I built a company's first sales performance reporting, carried a number myself, led the inside sales team that produced most of a company's revenue, and then ran the analytics function that told a combined company whether any of its numbers were real.

The pattern was the same everywhere. Someone would ask a straightforward question — which events actually produce pipeline, why is that region down, what are we genuinely renewing — and it would take days, and the answer would be soft. The money wasn't hidden. It just wasn't anybody's job to notice.

That's the book, and it's the practice.

Certiport · TestOut · CompTIA · co-founder of MetrixGrove

Start with the free read

Tell me roughly what's going on and I'll send the twelve numbers back, with a note on which ones matter most for a business like yours. No fee, no obligation, and no follow-up sequence.

Prefer email? [email protected]