The revenue recovery audit: a 90-minute exercise that finds five-figure losses

The first time we ran this audit on a glazing business in Surrey, the owner did not believe the number. He insisted we'd made a mistake. By the end of the conversation, he was on the phone to his sales lead asking why nobody had chased forty-three quotes worth, in aggregate, just over £180,000.

The audit takes 90 minutes. The dead money it finds, in our experience, sits between £15,000 and £55,000 a month for an established home improvement business. Here is how to run it on your own business this week — and the typical numbers we find when we do it for clients.

What you will need

• Your last three months of enquiry data (whichever system has it)
• Your last three months of quotes sent
• Phone records for the last 30 days, including missed calls
• A coffee, an honest hour, and a willingness to write down the numbers as they fall out

The five lines of dead money

Every revenue recovery audit looks at five lines, in this order. The order matters — we do the easiest fixes first because they fund the harder ones.

1. Slow lead response

Pick fifty enquiries from the last three months and write down how long it took for the first response to leave your team. Not how long it felt. How long it actually took, in minutes.

The honest number is almost always over an hour. For most businesses we audit, the median is between four and seven hours. The cost of that delay is enormous — statistically, an enquiry left more than an hour is half a quote.

2. Un-chased quotes

Open your quoting tool. Filter by quotes sent more than 21 days ago, status not signed, status not lost. The list is usually longer than the owner expects, and the total value is usually well into six figures.

This pile is the closest thing to free money in your entire business. A published cadence of follow-ups recovers somewhere between 25% and 40% of it, every time we install it.

3. Missed calls

Pull your call log for the last 30 days. Count the missed calls. For each one, check whether anything happened — a return call, a text-back, an email, anything. The answer is usually no.

Every missed call without an instant text-back is, statistically, half a quote. The fix takes a day to install and pays for itself inside a week.

4. After-hours enquiries

Look at the timestamps on your last 100 web form submissions. Count how many landed outside 9-to-5. For a typical home improvement business, it is between 40% and 55%. Then ask yourself how those enquiries were handled overnight. The answer is usually "they sat there until the morning".

By morning, three competitors have replied. The fix is AI capture — overnight conversational pickup that gathers the basics, sets expectations, and routes the enquiry to the right person at 9.01am.

5. Reviews

Open Google. Look at how many reviews you have collected in the last 90 days. Compare that to how many installs you have completed in the last 90 days. The ratio is almost always damning.

Reviews drive the algorithm that drives your inbound. Without an automated request after every install, your CPL climbs and your inbound suppresses, monthly.

What to do with the number

Add up the five lines. The number you get is your monthly dead money — what is currently being lost, every month, in the gap between enquiry and signed job. It is also, to a first approximation, the amount you can recover with a Conversion Operating System in place.

The right next step is to run the audit with your real numbers, or to book a Discovery Call and walk us through the audit you just did.

The wrong next step is to assume you'll get to it next quarter. The pile keeps growing.