Flat out, but not getting ahead? Find out what to fix first.
When everything is urgent, you end up fixing whatever shouts loudest that week. Next week something else shouts, and the thing you fixed turns out not to have been the problem.
This report finds the one constraint holding the rest of the business back — and tells you how to check it before you spend a dollar on it.
Your Business Bottleneck Report — $197 on its own, or free as your first choice. One per plumbing business. No payment details.
A business only ever has one thing holding it back at a time.
That is the idea behind the Theory of Constraints, and it is the least popular idea in business advice, because it means most of what you are working on this week does not matter.
A plumbing business is a line: enquiries come in, they turn into booked jobs, the jobs get done, the invoices get paid. Work moves along that line at the speed of its slowest point. Everything else has spare capacity, whether it feels like it or not.
So if the slow point is that you cannot answer the phone between nine and three, then a better website adds nothing. The enquiries already arrive. They just die on the missed call.
And if the slow point is that you can only fit four jobs a day, then more enquiries make the diary worse, not better. You get busier, more stressed, and no richer.
This is why owners spend money on marketing and feel no change. The money went somewhere with spare capacity.
What the interview covers
You talk to an AI assistant for a few minutes. It asks about the business and about this topic in particular. What you say decides what gets looked at.
- —What the business looks like now — jobs a week, average job value, who answers the phone
- —Where work comes from at the moment, and what you have already tried
- —What actually happens between an enquiry arriving and a job being booked
- —What happens after the job: invoicing, follow-up, and how long you wait to be paid
- —What you want the business to look like — more jobs, bigger jobs, or fewer hours
What you get back
The most likely constraint, named
One of four: getting enquiries, converting them, doing the work, or getting paid. Named plainly, with the reasoning shown so you can disagree with it.
How to check it before you spend anything
A simple thing to count for a fortnight. If the numbers say I am wrong, you will know before committing time or money — which is the point.
A 30-day plan built around what you said you want
Three or four actions in order, aimed at the constraint and nothing else. Short, because a long list is how the important thing gets buried again.
When this is a waste of your time
If you already know exactly what the problem is and you are simply avoiding it, this will tell you what you already know. Save the half hour.
It cannot tell you anything useful if the answers are vague. If you do not know roughly what a job is worth or how many enquiries you get in a week, say so on the call — that gap is often the finding.
And it is a diagnosis, not a repair. It will not answer your phone, rewrite your website or chase your debtors. It tells you which of those is worth doing first.
Who you're actually dealing with
Two blokes I've done this for. Neither is a plumber — they're cleaners on the Gold Coast — but both were paying for leads before we started, and neither is now.
I sold perfume door to door for five years. I thought I was good at it. I wasn't — what sold the perfume was the fragrance. I turned up and held the bottle.
Your website is supposed to be the fragrance. You're already doing the turning up: the van, the ads, the hours, the callouts at 2am. What's written on that site is the bit that has to do the persuading when you're not in the room.
Two businesses I helped build and sold went on to list on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. I moved to Australia in 2000 and have been building websites and generating leads for local trade businesses for the last ten years.
We used to spend up to $1,200 per week on Google AdWord campaigns for a steady workflow. In a matter of three months Hilton managed to get us ranked in the top position of the Google Map pack for multiple primary keywords, and implemented software that increased our reviews from 18 to over 100. No more AdWords or looking for customers.
I'd been paying for leads from Jim's, HiPages, OneFlare and word of mouth. Hilton promoted my page so that it appears in the Google 3 pack across a wide area for different keywords. This has totally transformed my business — I no longer pay for leads and have withdrawn from both HiPages and OneFlare.
Straight up: neither of those is a plumber — they're cleaners on the Gold Coast. Same game though, and both of them were paying good money for leads before we started.
Which part of the line is slowest? Let's find out.
Choose this one, or look at the other five first — whichever you pick, the first one is free.
[[NEEDS INPUT: the real booking link for the interview. Until it exists this button rings Hilton on 0488 845 404.]]
One free report per plumbing business across the Gold Coast, Brisbane and Tweed Heads. Prices in Australian dollars, including GST where it applies. Back to all six reports.