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This is the plan we run for Fix Sprint clients — the daily sequence for closing the one leak that shows up in almost every scan of a trade business: leads that arrive and wait. Published here in full, free, with nothing gated. Read it, run it yourself, and never talk to us.
Job value and lead volume are yours to supply. Where we don't know a number, we say so.
01 · The leak
The most common finding in a Business X-Ray is not a bad website or a thin ad budget. It's the gap between a lead arriving and somebody answering it. A form fill at 7:40pm on a Friday. A missed call during a job. A quote sent and never followed up.
Twelve percent of contractors respond to a new lead within five minutesMeasured. The average first response across the trade is about four hoursMeasured. Leads answered inside five minutes convert roughly twenty-one times better than those answered after thirtyMeasured — the figures are Hatch's analysis of 132,188 speed-to-lead campaigns and the widely replicated MIT response-time study.
Source detail lives on the main site under the scan evidence block. We keep the same sources and the same labels here.
02 · The sum
This is the arithmetic a report puts in front of an owner. Every line is either something you supply or something we measured — never a number we invented. Fill in your own job value and lead volume.
At a thousand dollars a job that's $96,000 to $170,400 a year walking out between the enquiry and the callback. Your job value changes the total but not the shape of the problem.
Two of those five lines are labelled estimates, and that is deliberate. The after-hours share and the wait-rate are assumptions until we measure your actual lead log. A report that printed them as facts would be lying to you on our own letterhead. If you can't supply the inputs, the honest output is "Needs data" — not a big number.
03 · The plan
Two weeks, arranged so that whoever actually answers your phone can do it without a consultant in the room. Most days are under thirty minutes. Day 1 is the only one that needs your calendar.
Count what you're actually losing
Pull the last 90 days of leads — form fills, calls, texts, DMs. For each one, write down when it arrived and when the first human reply went out. If you can't get the timestamps, that is the finding: you are running a business on a channel you cannot measure.
Pick the number and name the owner
Choose one target: first reply inside five minutes, measured from arrival, during business hours. Then write down the single name of the person who owns that number. Not a team. Not "the office." One name, and a backup for days off.
Write three replies and stop writing
One for a form fill, one for a missed call, one for after hours. Each under forty words, each ending in a question that can be answered with one thumb. Save them as canned responses or keyboard shortcuts so replying is faster than ignoring.
Turn on missed-call text-back
If a call goes unanswered, the caller gets a text within a minute: "Sorry we missed you — what's the job? We'll call back inside 10 minutes." This is the cheapest single fix in the trade and it usually costs less than a tank of fuel a month.
Route after-hours to a phone, not an inbox
An after-hours form fill landing in a shared inbox is a lead sitting in a drawer. Send it to a phone that rings, or to whoever is on call, with the job type in the first line so they can decide in five seconds.
Put follow-up on the calendar, not in your head
Every quote goes out with three scheduled touches: day 1, day 3, day 7. Each one is a question, not a nudge — "does the scope look right?" beats "just checking in." Put them in the calendar as appointments so they happen on a job site.
Measure the week
Median first-reply time. Count of leads that waited more than an hour. Nothing else. If the median came down, the mechanism works and the next seven days are about making it survive you being busy.
Four numbers on one screen
Leads received today, median first reply, leads older than an hour with no reply, quotes awaiting an answer. Four numbers, visible to whoever answers the phone. Not a dashboard project — a whiteboard or a pinned note works.
Ask for the review at job close
The review ask goes out the same day the job is signed off, from the person who did the work, with the technician's name in it. Asking a week later is asking a stranger. Ask once; if there's no reply, ask again after the next job.
Test it from a stranger's phone
Submit your own form from a phone that isn't yours, outside business hours, and see exactly what a real customer sees and how long the reply takes. This is where most plans fall apart — the process works in theory and the form has been broken since March.
Cut the form down
Ask for the website and an email, and nothing else, up front. Move job type, budget and timeline to the second screen after they've committed. Every field you put before the submit button is a reason to leave.
Find the lead source you're paying for and ignoring
Most shops have one channel — an LSA budget, a directory listing, a shared lead marketplace — that produces enquiries they never answer. Compare what it costs per booked job against your best channel. Cutting it is usually more profitable than adding anything.
Write the one page
One page: the five-minute standard, who owns it, the three templates, what happens after hours, and the four numbers. This is the document that survives a new hire and a busy summer. Without it, week three undoes weeks one and two.
Re-measure and decide
Same four numbers as day 7, against the day-1 baseline. Median first-reply time and leads that waited over an hour are the two that matter. Then decide, honestly, whether to keep going or hand it to someone — including us.
04 · What to measure on day 14
The last number is the one that pays for the fortnight. Everything else is a leading indicator at best.
05 · What this plan will not do
A fourteen-day plan fixes one leak: the wait. It does not fix lead volume, pricing, close rate on a properly answered quote, or whether the work is any good. Those are different leaks and different plans.
No results are guaranteed. Not a number of jobs, not a revenue figure, not a ranking. A plan cannot promise an outcome and any proposal that does should be read as a sales document rather than a diagnosis.
If you run this and the numbers don't move, the leak wasn't speed-to-lead and the scan would have said so. That's the useful part: a diagnosis is worth more when it can tell you what isn't wrong.
06 · Done for you
This page is the DIY version and it works without us. If you'd rather hand it over: the Fix Sprint implements the top leak — usually the lead-response front desk — live on your own phone and form setup, inside a week, for a one-time $750.
The free scan still comes first, and it still comes before any of this.