Business Model

How the practice acquires clients, and how the CRM encodes it.

Version 8.0 · November 2026

1. The model in one page

The practice sells through mornings. A room of owner-operators, a talk that names the problems they already have, and a structured follow-up that turns interest into a diagnostic and then into a client.

Everything upstream of the morning exists to fill that room with the right people, and everything downstream exists to convert them. The CRM is built around that shape.

2. Who we are looking for

Attribute	Target	Why
Turnover	£200k – £7m	Below £200k there is rarely budget. Above about £7m the business is generally too large for the practice: layers of management, and a slower, corporate decision.
Structure	VAT registered limited company	Verifiable on Companies House, and filing accounts means a real trading business.
Directors	One or two	The person in the room must be the person who can say yes.
Location	Within 90 minutes of BD20	Field visits and attendance both depend on it.
Trade	B2B — manufacturing, construction, haulage, wholesale, engineering, motor	Owner-operator businesses with operational ceilings.
Owner	Aged 28–55, five or more years in	Established enough to have hit a ceiling, engaged enough to want past it.

3. How qualification works

Qualification is deterministic. The language model estimates facts it is good at — likely turnover band, likely headcount, what the business does. The rubric turns those into a score. The same lead always produces the same number, and every point is attributable.

The rubric — twelve points

Criterion	Max	Bands
Turnover band	3	£200k–£2m = 3 · £2m–£7m = 2 · £7m–£15m = 2 · £100k–£200k = 1 · under £100k = 0 · over £15m = 0
Director count	2	1–2 = 2 · 3–4 = 1 · 5+ = 0
Owner tenure	2	5+ years = 2 · 2–5 = 1 · under 2 = 0
Drive time from BD20	2	under 1hr = 2 · 1–1.5hrs = 1 · beyond = 0
Trade fit	2	Target bundle = 2 · adjacent B2B = 1 · consumer = 0
Director age	1	28–55 = 1 · outside = 0
Size	−3	Once, if the band is £7m–£15m or over £15m, or enrichment estimates 50+ staff

The headcount test exists because the oversized businesses met in practice often had their turnover underestimated; a band rule alone missed them.

Companies House verification is a gate rather than a criterion. A business that cannot be verified receives no score at all.

Caps

A purely additive score lets a lead fail the things that matter most and still finish green. Caps prevent that.

Condition	Caps at	Reasoning
Beyond 90 minutes of BD20	Red	The model's hard constraint
Turnover above £15m	Red	Corporate buying behaviour
Over £7m, by band or 50+ staff	Amber	Generally too large for the practice — and never in Ready to invite
Five or more directors	Amber	Decision-maker unlikely to attend
Outside target trades	Amber	Proposition does not fit
Director based outside range	Amber	Business reachable, owner may not travel
Two or more amber caps	Red	Failing on more than one axis

Three addresses, two questions

The trading address decides whether a visit is viable. The director's address decides whether the owner will travel to a morning. The registered office is frequently the accountant's and is only a fallback.

4. The funnel end to end

Before the morning — filling the room

The invitation is a printed card handed over in person, and the ticket is a posted card on heavy stock. In a market where every other approach is a cold email, a tangible object carries weight and signals selectivity. The ticket is a bulk-printed shell finished per morning with one laser pass and two handwritten lines, which keeps that quality affordable.

The owner replies on the website, using the number on their card. The Mini Q — by phone with Karen or on the website — both confirms attendance and captures what the owner is struggling with, and the question they want answered on the morning.

After the morning — converting the room

Step 6 is the conversation that follows the morning. The Main Questionnaire is the deeper instrument, and the Diagnostic is where the engagement is agreed. All three dates are set on one card, usually in one call.

5. One identifier, card to client

Every card carries a unique six-character number with a check character. The same number is the website's key, the ticket reference written by hand, and the booking reference. There is no second numbering, so nothing has to be reconciled.

• Recording, never allocation. The card goes into the owner's hand first; its number is recorded against them afterwards. The roll of two thousand is a validation list, not a pool the CRM hands out from.
• A replacement card is the same invitation. The newest card is the reference; everything done on either is counted once, by business.
• What the website sees is observation, not judgement. The card strip and the roll-ups are derived live; nothing is promoted into the record until someone in the Web inbox decides it should be.
• No third-party tracking. The only behaviour recorded is what the owner does with their own code.

6. Why the Pipeline sits outside events

Events are temporary. Leads are permanent. A lead passes through a morning and comes out with an outcome; the board closes, the lead does not. The Pipeline holds them across every morning they have touched, carrying the reason they declined and the challenge they described.

It also means the pool is built when no morning is booked. Booking one becomes a matter of drawing from a ready pool rather than a scramble.

The farm list and the follow-up

Qualification and timing are independent. The farm list holds a good fit until there is a morning to offer. Follow-up 6mth parks a "not now" with a date, and Today brings it back when the date arrives. Do not invite is honoured absolutely: the lead sits in no pool and cannot be added to a morning.

The two working motions

Motion	What it is	When
Farming	Find, qualify, visit, hand over cards. Build Ready to invite.	Continuous, between mornings
Rework	Re-approach everyone who declined or did not attend, with a new date.	The fortnight after each morning

7. What to measure

The funnel is long, so the useful measures are step-to-step rates, read morning by morning. A total across mornings hides the one that went wrong. All of them are on the KPIs screen, behind the login.

Step	What it tells you
Cards handed over, week by week	Whether farming is keeping pace. Nothing downstream can beat it.
Cards out → opened	Whether the card earns a look.
Cards out → confirmed online	The strength of the invitation and the visit.
Registered → Mini Q	Whether people are being reached. The best early predictor of attendance.
Registered → attended	The show rate — the number that matters most. Every physical touch exists to protect it.
Attended → Step 6	Whether the morning earned a conversation.
Attended → client	The close, measured against the room.

Milestones are kept once reached, so a morning's figures do not fall as its guests move on.

Running more than one practice on it

The system runs two cost centres — GC Practice and The Business Fix — from one codebase. Each has its own database, login and colour, and shares nothing but the code.

The Business Fix CRM · Business Model v8.0 · November 2026