Debrief · Tue 25 Aug · visit complete
What you actually found
The two men who run the place do not agree on whether there is a problem.
That is worth more than anything you went in looking for. Everything below hangs off it.
Both said this in the same building, within the same hour.
The founder also said he cannot speak to the other man's ability or capabilities. That is not a neutral sentence.
That line is the most dangerous thing in this file. It never reaches the president, in any form, ever.
Do not take a side, and do not be the one who tells either man what the other said. The moment you become a messenger between them you stop being useful to both.
This page said the two men disagreed 3x on enquiry volume. Checked against the tape on 26 Aug: they did not.
The founder was asked directly what they get per month. His answer, verbatim:
“we're getting up to it right now — I don't know, I don't think so.”
He then built a worked example to explain the model, and that is where the number came from:
“If you have 15 inquiries in a month and you know what you're doing, the probability … at least 50 percent is higher.”
He never claimed 15 a month as the current volume. He was asked, said he did not know, and reasoned from a hypothetical. He is absentee and says so himself. A conditional got written down as an assertion, and the file carried it for a day as the thing gating everything else.
What actually exists is one soft figure: the president's “ten a week”, from a two-minute recording where the question that preceded it is not on the tape.
Nobody at this company counts enquiries. Or visitors. Or which of the 200 were called. Or purchase orders.
So it is not a demand problem and not a qualification problem. It is a measurement problem, one level below both. Two people describing the same business differently is what a firm with no shared measurement looks like from the inside.
The most important thing the founder said, close to verbatim.
“This month, I know how much I put in here. Just to keep it open. But it's not something I want to continue doing. I don't have the resources anymore.”
Correction to your first read: “he cannot fund anything” is too strong.
He will not throw good money after bad, and he will not keep funding survival. He will fund something small, concrete and provable that shows a path. He is not expecting you to work for free. A rebuild is not fundable. A couple of thousand for something he can see working is.
Unprompted, from the president. This is the single most useful thing anyone said all day.
“Your website has to be made functional. And effective. So you can see the people that click on it, easily Google them, see what company they are, and call them back.”
“Then I can say, oh, I noticed you were looking at our website, is there anything I can do?”
That is visitor identification feeding a calling motion that already exists. It is small, it is buildable, and the client scoped it, not you.
This is not a rebuild for vanity. Do not let it grow into one.
Part three of the visit overturned what you believed after part one.
The 200 existing relationships is confirmed. The president named the number himself. But they are not sitting uncontacted. Asked how often he reaches out:
“Go through them at least weekly.”
What he has instead of a system, in his words: “I have a couple different stacks. People that are kind of twiddling their fingers. And the ones that feel like we're getting somewhere with.”
Stacks. Paper or mental. No CRM, no tracking, no sequence.
Kill the “nobody has called them” pitch. He is already doing the work, weekly, with nothing to do it with. The gap is infrastructure, not effort.
The president's own reasons, and why they still point somewhere specific.
His summary: “some of them have dreams and we try to jump in bed with them, but it requires money.”
Now hold that against a former customer. They already have a formula, already know it costs money, already cleared the $500 gate and the 2,000 minimum. Every reason a new enquiry dies is a reason a lapsed customer would not.
His own strategy, unprompted: “get these companies that are already on the shelf, already have a history, and take over their work for them.” His own reality check: “a lot of them are bigger labs.”
These are closed. Do not ask them again.
Send the thank-you and ask for the date.
The founder's goes first, and it carries the ask for a morning next week. The joint one to the president follows the same day, with no ask in it. Never the president's alone, and never before the founder's.
Put a date on the coffee in his town.
He proposed it himself and you agreed, but no date was set. That was the one thing you were not supposed to leave without. It is the whole point of email one.
Ask for the purchase orders, not the enquiries.
⛔ Do not re-ask the enquiry count. He already answered it, and he already wondered whether you were competition. Ask instead: “how many purchase orders did you issue in the last twelve months, and what did they total?” One pull, no judgement, and it yields the account count, the average order and the close rate at once.
Scope the small provable build, not the rebuild.
Visitor identification on the existing site, feeding the calling he already does weekly. Something demonstrable in two weeks. He has no money and no patience for a long build.
Get your collaborator's role and share in writing.
Before he is on a call with this client, not after. Nothing else on this list is blocked by it, and it gets harder to raise every week it slips.
Do not quote a percentage of his revenue until something has been counted. A fixed fee priced on your own hours is fine now, because that work is what produces the count.
He read you as a threat in the room. If he goes defensive there is no deal.
His actual question, near the door: “your t-shirt says Labs — are you competition?” Behind it is a fairer worry: a firm arrives to look at efficiency at a struggling company, and the president of that company is the obvious cost to cut.
He must always be the beneficiary, never the audited. He named the product. He does the calling. Anything built here makes his week work better.
No document requests. Asking a man who thinks you might be competition to hand over his files is the exact shape of the thing he is afraid of.
One safe, concrete thing you can raise for free: a departed employee is still on their team page. Obviously true, costs nobody face, and proves you looked.
Any one of these costs you the room, or the deal.
The founder asked, unprompted: “years ago you could buy a list of potential customers — how do you do that now?”
You steered him off purchased lists, correctly. But he is still shopping for a lead source. If you do not give him one, somebody will sell him a bad one.
Reference only. You will be in the room again. Skim when you need it.
What he is
The economics
The process, in order
Compliance — recognise, never lead with
Use these only to understand what he makes. Never to probe how he complies.
Kept for the record. Both are superseded by everything above.