Look. Every week, somewhere between four and fifteen real opportunities land in your world. A text, a voicemail, an email, a form, somebody who stopped you at the counter. And every week some number of those get no response at all. Not because you don't care. Because it came in on Tuesday at 4:50 while three other things were on fire and it just… fell.
You have no idea how many. That's the actual problem. If you knew the number you'd fix it tomorrow.
This takes 20 minutes on a Friday and tells you exactly what came in and exactly what got dropped. First time you run it you're going to be annoyed at what you find. Good. That's the point.
What you need
- Claude
- Your phone and your email
- 20 minutes, Friday afternoon or Sunday night, pick one and keep it
Setup
- Gather the week. Four places, five minutes:
- Your texts. Scroll back to Monday and copy anything from a customer or a possible customer.
- Your call log. Note the missed calls and any number you don't recognize.
- Your email. Search your inbox with
after:and the Monday date. In Gmail that's typed straight in the search bar likeafter:2026/8/11. - Your form or booking tool if you have one. Pull the week's entries.
- Dump all of it into one note. Messy is fine. Do not clean it up, you'll never do this again if it takes an hour.
- Paste the prompt below, then paste your dump under it.
- You get back what came in, what you answered, and what's sitting there with nothing.
- Then actually do the follow-ups. The report is worthless if you read it and close it.
- Same time every week. Put it on the calendar as a repeating event right now.
The prompts
The weekly report:
I run a [YOUR BUSINESS TYPE] in [YOUR CITY]. Below is everything that
came into my business this week: texts, missed calls, emails, form
submissions. It's raw and out of order.
Give me a written weekly report:
1. WHAT CAME IN. A simple count by type. New leads, existing customers,
vendors, junk.
2. GOT NO REPLY. This is the important one. Every message that came in
with no response from me. For each: who, when, what they wanted, and
how bad it is that I didn't answer. Sort worst first.
3. STILL OPEN. Things where I replied but it's not resolved and it's
sitting on me.
4. WHERE MY LEADS ACTUALLY CAME FROM. Break down the new inquiries by
how they reached me.
5. THE PATTERN. Looking at what got dropped, tell me the honest reason.
Is it a time of day thing, a channel thing, a type-of-request thing?
Be blunt with me, don't soften it.
6. MONDAY LIST. The 5 things I should do first thing Monday, in order,
with the specific person and what to say in one line.
Here's the week:
[PASTE EVERYTHING]Catch the dropped ones up:
Take the GOT NO REPLY list above. For each person, write me a short
message I can send right now. It has to acknowledge the delay honestly
without over-apologizing or making excuses. Under 200 characters each.
Reference their specific thing. Do not say "sorry for the delayed
response" on every single one, vary it.Compare to last week:
Here's last week's report. Compare it to this week's and tell me what
changed. Is the same thing getting dropped both weeks? If so, say it
plainly and tell me what one change would fix it.
[PASTE LAST WEEK'S REPORT]What to check before you trust it
It can only see what you paste. If you forget a channel, the report will confidently tell you that channel had nothing. Same four places, every week, or the number's a lie.
The "no reply" list is going to include stuff you handled on the phone or in person. That's fine. Scan it, cross those off, and don't let it make you think the tool's broken.
Don't paste anything with card numbers, account numbers, medical details, or a full home address. Names and what they wanted is plenty.
The report is not the work. It's a list of who to call. If you read four of these and never make a call, you've built a very efficient way to feel bad on Fridays.
Run it three weeks before you judge the pattern. One week is noise. Three weeks is a system problem, and system problems have fixes.
— Jordan