Real quick, before you go chase another customer.
There's money sitting in your business right now that you already earned. You did the work. You sent the invoice. Somewhere between then and now it quietly stopped being yours and nobody said anything.
Nothing in here requires a single new customer. No ads. No leads. No selling. It's all cleanup.
And none of it is exciting, which is exactly why it's still sitting there.
Nothing in this document can break anything. You're reading numbers you already have. That's it.
Before you start: strip the sensitive stuff
You're about to paste business records into a tool. Take thirty seconds first.
Take out full card numbers, social security numbers, bank account numbers, and anybody's personal information that isn't yours to share.
Your own revenue, your own costs, your own job list, your own pricing… all fine. I put those in constantly.
The test: would I email this to a stranger? If no, take it out.
Rest of it's yours
Drop your email and the whole thing opens up right here. No waiting on a confirmation, no download, nothing to install.
You'll also get the new ones as I make them. Leave whenever, no hard feelings.
1. Subscriptions you forgot you're paying for
Everybody finds something here. Everybody.
Pull three months of bank or card statements. Paste them in:
Here are 3 months of business account statements.
[paste]
Find every recurring charge. For each one:
- Who it's to
- How much per month
- How much per year
- Whether it hit all 3 months or only some
Sort by annual cost, biggest first.
Flag anything that looks like a duplicate of something else on the list.That duplicate flag is where it gets ugly. Most people are paying two or three companies for jobs that overlap.
Then the honest part: go down the list and say out loud what each one actually does for you. The ones where you pause… that's your answer.
2. The job type that loses money every single time
This one got me and I would have bet real money I was wrong.
You've got a type of work you're proud of. It's your best work. You take every one that comes in.
And it might be underwater.
Here's my job data: what each job brought in, what it cost me, and what type of work it was.
[paste]
Group them by job type. For each group:
- Total revenue
- Total cost
- Actual profit
- Profit as a percentage
- Average per job
Then tell me straight: which job type is my worst on percentage, and which is my worst on dollars? Those might not be the same one, say so if they aren't.Two things to know before you act on it.
It gets numbers wrong. Spot check anything you're about to make a decision on. I mean actually pull the calculator out.
Percentage and dollars are different problems. A job type at 8% margin doing huge volume might still be your best account. Don't kill something on a percentage alone.
3. Invoices nobody ever chased
Here are my invoices.
[paste: invoice number, customer, date, amount, paid or not]
Show me everything unpaid, oldest first.
For each: how many days past due and how much.
Give me the total sitting out there.
Flag anyone with more than one unpaid.That total number is usually the moment people go quiet.
The reason it's sitting there isn't that you forgot. It's that sending the message feels awkward. So here's one that isn't:
Hey [name], invoice [#] from [date] is showing open on my end.
Might already be handled, my bookkeeping isn't always instant.
If not, here it is again: [link]"Might already be handled" does the work. Gives them an out, nobody gets defensive, and it actually goes out instead of sitting in your head for six weeks.
4. Quotes that went cold
Every business has a stack of people who wanted the work and then just… stopped responding.
They didn't hate your price. Most of the time life got in the way and neither of you followed up.
Here are quotes I sent that never closed.
[paste: customer, what it was for, amount, date sent]
Sort by which ones are most worth chasing again, and tell me why for each.
Consider how big the job was, how long it's been, and whether it's the kind of work that comes back around.
Then write me a short text for the top 10. Under 40 words each.
Each one has to sound like a person, not a follow-up sequence.Read every message before it goes. It'll get some of them wrong.
5. Pricing you haven't touched while everything you buy went up
Be honest about the last time you raised your prices.
Now think about what your materials, your fuel, your insurance, and your labor have done in that same stretch.
I've charged [your price] for [your service] since [year].
My costs since then: [materials up X%, labor up Y%, whatever you know].
Work out what I'd need to charge just to be where I was.
Then give me 3 ways to raise it without blowing up my existing customers, and tell me the risk with each.You do not have to act on it. But you should know the number instead of guessing at it.
6. Customers who bought once and nobody ever called back
Covered this in the follow-up material, but it belongs on this list because it's the biggest one.
The cheapest customer you will ever get is the one who already paid you and forgot you exist.
Here's my customer list with what they bought and when.
[paste]
Find everyone who bought once, 6 to 24 months ago, and never came back.
Group them by what would make sense to offer them now.
Tell me which group to call first and why.What to actually do with all this
Don't do all six this week. You won't, and then you'll feel like shit about it.
Pick one. Sunday afternoon, coffee, two hours.
If you want my order: unchased invoices first, because that's money that's already yours and it takes the least nerve. Then subscriptions, because it's fast and you'll find something. Then the job-type analysis, because it's the one that changes how you run the place.
I cleared three years of this stuff in one afternoon on a Sunday in sweatpants. Put it off for three years before that because opening the folder made me feel sick.
The folder was never the problem. The dread was.
— Jordan