Your books are complete. Every rupee that came in and went out is there, checked and balanced.
And yet the most important number in your business is missing from them entirely, because accounts record what happened and nobody records what nearly happened.
What nearly happened last month
An enquiry that got a reply on Thursday instead of Tuesday. A quotation sent and never followed up, because the person who sent it assumed silence meant no. A customer who bought every month for two years and has not bought since March, and nobody noticed because nothing in the business watches for absence.
A repeat order that went elsewhere because your rate list was out of date and the first number quoted was too high.
None of these produced a document. There is nothing to file, nothing to count, nothing to discuss in a review.
A rough way to size it
You do not need precision. You need an order of magnitude, because that is enough to decide whether this deserves attention.
Take the enquiries you received last month. Take the share that never got a quotation. Multiply by your average order value, then by a conservative close rate, say one in five.
Most owners doing this for the first time get a number that is larger than their monthly profit. It is not money you would definitely have made. It is the size of the leak, and it is almost always bigger than the cost of fixing it.
Which is why this is worth sizing even roughly. Nobody fixes a problem they have never measured.
Do the arithmetic for last month. How does the number compare with what you earned?
Sizing that leak with an owner, and then closing the biggest part of it, is most of what we do. Send us last month's enquiry numbers and we will work it out with you.
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