I Checked Two Thousand Local Businesses From the Outside. I Still Couldn't Tell You Which Ones Were Losing Money.

Over the past few weeks I've run two studies on local businesses in and around St. Charles County. I checked 446 websites the way a stranger's browser sees them. I looked up the public mail settings on 1,525 domains.

Both turned up real problems. Sites loading insecurely. Contact forms with nowhere to send. Businesses paying a vendor every month with no way to know whether it works. Domains anyone could forge email from.

Here's the part I didn't expect. After all of it, I sat down to write to the businesses I'd found problems at, and I couldn't finish the emails.

Not because the findings were wrong. Because I couldn't tell any of those owners what the problems were costing them. And a defect you can't price is just a complaint.

What you can see from outside

Quite a lot, actually. From a laptop, without asking anyone's permission, you can find out whether a business's website loads securely, whether search engines are allowed to index it, whether its contact form has a destination, how fast its pages render, whether anyone could send email using its domain.

Every one of those is a real fact. Some of them matter.

But look at what they have in common. They're all properties of the front door. They describe the thing customers see before they've become customers. Not one of them touches what happens after somebody makes contact.

What you can't see, and why it's where the money is

Here's the list I'd actually want, and not one item on it is visible from the outside.

How long it takes to answer a new lead. A form that works and a form that's answered in twenty minutes are the same form from the street. The best-known research here found that contacting a web lead within five minutes rather than thirty raised the odds of reaching that person at all by about a hundred times. That study is worth a footnote of its own: it's from 2007, it covered six business-to-business companies rather than local trades, it was run with a company that sells lead-response software, and it is almost always miscredited to Harvard — it was MIT. I'd treat the exact multiplier as indicative rather than precise. The direction has never been seriously disputed. From outside, I can tell you a form submits. I can't tell you it sits unread until Monday.

Where the same information gets typed twice. Somebody takes a call and writes it on a pad. Somebody types the pad into a quoting tool. Somebody types the quote into an invoice. Somebody types the invoice into the accounting system. That's four keystrokes of the same address, three chances to fat-finger a number, and an hour a day that shows up in payroll and nowhere else. It is completely invisible from the street and it is the single most common thing I find.

Software that's paid for and not used. Most small businesses I talk to are already paying for tools that do more than they've turned on. Scheduling that can text a confirmation. A CRM with a follow-up sequence nobody built. A quoting tool with templates nobody filled in. The bill arrives either way. From outside, I can't see a subscription — I can only see the website it didn't get connected to.

Work that lives in one person's head. The estimator who knows what to charge for a difficult roof. The office manager who knows which supplier to call when the usual one is out. That knowledge is worth real money and it walks out the door at five o'clock, and on the day that person quits it's gone. No external check has ever detected it.

What's in the inbox nobody reads. The info@ address that forwards somewhere abandoned. The voicemail box that fills up. From the outside these look exactly like the working versions.

Every item on that list has a dollar figure attached, and every item is only visible from inside.

Why everyone sells you the outside list anyway

Because it scales. One person with a laptop can scan two thousand businesses in a weekend — I know, because I did — and generate two thousand personalized-looking emails from the results. It costs almost nothing and it looks like research.

It also frightens people reliably. A list of twelve red items on your website reads as urgent whether or not any of them is costing you a dollar. That's the business model: find something checkable, present it alarmingly, sell the fix.

I built the tooling to do exactly that. It works. And having done it, I don't think the output is worth much, which is an awkward thing to conclude after building it.

The defects are real. The prioritization is fake. Nobody scanning you from outside can tell you which of your twelve red items matters, because that depends entirely on things they can't see.

So what's the alternative

A conversation. That's it, and I've come to think the plainness of it is the point.

Twenty minutes on the phone or a few emails back and forth, in which I ask what happens when a new customer calls, what you or your staff do more than once a day that feels like it shouldn't need doing, and what you're paying for that you're not sure you're using.

I'm not being coy about a methodology. Those questions genuinely surface more in twenty minutes than my scanner found in two thousand domains, because they're aimed at the part where money actually moves.

Sometimes that conversation turns up nothing worth acting on, and I'll tell you so. Sometimes it turns up something you already knew and had stopped noticing. Occasionally it turns up something with a real number attached, and then it's worth digging into properly.

What I'm not going to tell you

I'm not going to tell you the outside checks don't matter. If your website won't load securely, fix it. If your form goes nowhere, that one's urgent. I published both of those studies and I stand behind the numbers. I'm saying they're the smaller half.

I'm not going to tell you I can spot your problem from here. That's the whole argument. Anyone who emails you claiming to know what's wrong inside your business, based on a scan of the outside, is guessing — and I'd know, because I nearly sent those emails.

I'm not going to tell you every business has a problem worth paying to fix. Plenty don't. A four-person operation where everyone sits in the same room and knows what's happening is often working fine, and the answer is to leave it alone.

And I'm not going to pretend this is disinterested. I run a one-person practice doing exactly this work, and I'd like to work with local businesses. But the argument stands on its own, and you can act on the whole of it without ever contacting me: go ask your own staff what they do twice.

Source

Lead Response Management Study — Dr. James B. Oldroyd, MIT Sloan School of Management, in partnership with InsideSales.com (2007). Three years of data, 2004–2007, across six companies generating and responding to web leads: over 15,000 leads and more than 100,000 call attempts. The finding: the odds of contacting a lead called in 5 minutes versus 30 minutes drop by 100 times; the odds of qualifying drop by 21 times. https://www.insidesales.com/lead-response-management-infographic/

Three things worth knowing about that number, since it gets quoted constantly. It is routinely credited to Harvard — that's a different study (Oldroyd, McElheran and Elkington, Harvard Business Review, 2011), which audited 2,241 US firms and found an average first response time of 42 hours. It is also often misquoted as "5 minutes versus 10 minutes"; the real comparator is 30. And it was conducted with a company that sells software for responding to leads faster, which doesn't make it wrong but is worth knowing.

I verified this through sources that reproduce the study's exact wording rather than from the original document, and I'd rather say so than imply otherwise. Everything else in this post comes from my own scans or my own experience.

Fifteen years of my working life was spent inside large companies, connecting systems that had to talk to each other. Big companies have someone whose job is to notice when a process is costing more than it should. Most businesses here don't, and it isn't because the problems are smaller.

If you want to have the conversation, it's free and there's nothing attached to it. Get in touch and tell me what your business does. I'll ask a few questions and tell you honestly whether I see anything worth pursuing.

If I don't, I'll say that too.