The Same Conversation, Six Months Running

The Same Conversation, Six Months Running

Over the last six months, I've sat across the table from many different businesses. A one-person operator working from a spare room. A multi-office estate agency chain with a fully mapped management structure, finance team and marketing department. A first-phase proptech startup with investors and a product roadmap, but also a burn rate to answer for.

On paper, anyone might assume these businesses have next to nothing in common. In practice, I keep having the same conversation.

And the reality is, the pinch points don't change in business, only the scale does.

Once we strip away size, sector, structure and funding, what's left is usually some combination of the same four things: systems, processes, people, and cash flow.

Whether I am working with a business with five staff members or fifty, and whether it is a few months into a bold new venture or helping a founder plot maximising the value of their business as we plot out their route to a successful exit, they tend to be tripping over the same wires – even if those are wired at different voltages.

The system built for a team of three is now creaking under a team of twelve. The process that worked when the founder did everything themselves hasn't been formally documented anywhere, so nobody else can do it the same way. Great people are struggling in the wrong seats, or the wrong people are failing in the right seats, but either way something isn't landing.

And when it comes to cash flow – predictable, reliable cash flow – that often seems to be the thing everyone worries about most, but nobody forecasts properly.

Different businesses, but all with the same architecture of problems.

Why Growth is Really the Goal

There is one particular target all businesses are really aiming for. Even though a business owner may call me in because they are worried about survival, the underlying ambition isn't survival. It's growth.

Nobody wants to redefine their business in order to simply limp through. They want to grow their way to safety, and then some; to keep going and to build something that actually succeeds.

If they are already doing well, they want to know what's somehow capping them; what is the blockage that is stopping good results becoming great ones.

Survival and success sit together on the same continuum. The same axis on a graph. But there is a mindset that also comes into play. The business that crunches the numbers and plans the KPIs in order to "get through this year, and then we’ll see where we are in January"… well, that is usually the one that stays stuck longest, because they're actively planning for the wrong outcome.

The Default Move to Spend More is Often a False Friend

When something isn't working, the instinct in most businesses is to throw money at the problem. The trouble with this approach is that what might look like the problem is not the real issue.

Spending more on marketing is the classic example. Instruction numbers are down, so the answer must be that more valuation appointments are needed. The agent therefore increases the budget on printing and delivering more leaflets, or they throw more on boosted posts or on what they spend on the portals. We know that property transactions are down this year. Rightmove has just reported a 9% increase in revenue as agents upgrade to higher-tier packages. This is a classic case in point.

Sometimes it might be the right solution. Often it isn't. The question is, who has looked into it? Because if it is only the salesperson or account manager at Rightmove, that might not be telling you as the business owner all you really need to know. And that isn’t picking on Rightmove – they may well have the solution; all I am saying is that you don’t know that unless you have been through the exercise to work out where the problems actually lie and determined that the problem is a lack of new instructions, rather than anything else that might be blocking that cash flow,

Sometimes when I’m in consulting with clients, I will recommend increasing a marketing budget, but before I do that I want to know for sure whether marketing is actually the culprit.

Because what if it is the follow-up process instead? Fixing that costs nothing but discipline.

What if it is the template email you’re sending out, written 10 years ago to tick a box, when market conditions were very different?

What if it’s a training issue? After all, when was the last time you ran training with staff on asking open as opposed to closed questions, or brought them back up to speed on assumptive, urgency or alternative closing techniques? When was the last time you took a refresher on those things yourself?

Take a typical valuation. A homeowner has an agent round, gets on with the agent well and receives a good, solid pitch, and then... what? What’s the process? Is there a pre-valuation call the day before the appointment? Is there a follow-up letter going out within 24 hours, and what does it say? What does it look like? Does it speak to their problems or does it sound a little ‘me, me, me’?

Is there a Day 2 phone call, or does the act of making that follow-up call depend entirely on whether the lister remembers to make it? A task set on that front in a morning meeting can make the world of difference.

Has anyone offered the homeowner a weekly, fortnightly or even monthly market bulletin to keep the agency front of mind? And – critically – is anyone upline actually checking any of this happens? If it is all based on vibes and good intentions, business very quickly falls through the cracks, and money gets left on the table, to mix two metaphors.

If the process doesn't exist, or if it exists but only inside the founder’s head, you don't have a marketing problem. You have a process problem. And those can be incredibly inexpensive to fix – if not entirely free. It could be a simple case of asking the team’s input; the best processes often come from involving them, and it massively improves adoption and engagement.

What if it is a Marketing Issue?

Sometimes, it genuinely is a marketing problem. Even so, the next question must be: what kind?

Scattergun spending without a marketing strategy is its own version of the same mistake. Maybe the answer is short-form video. Maybe it's a blog that builds your authority over time, or a newsletter to nurture the warm leads you already cultivated but never closed. Maybe it's hyper-local, community-focused content that raises your profile in a different way to a new market. Or maybe what's missing isn't necessarily more marketing, but different marketing; marketing that actually demonstrates expertise, market analysis and commentary, written or video or perhaps even a podcast appearance or two, that shows you know the area better than the next agent along the high street.

The chances are it doesn’t come down to doing more "just sold" graphics on Canva, or rolling out the trusty Rightmove pie chart showing ‘Top selling agent in your town” (of one-bedroom detached bungalows in September 2022).

The point isn't which of these is right. It's that you can't know which is right without asking the question first. Spend is a decision, not a default – and the best decisions are informed ones.

Business Growth Needs a Plan

Every business I've worked with over these six months has wanted growth, even when they don’t see it that way at first.

Yet very few of them started with a genuine, objective audit to identify where the friction actually was.

They started with a guess – and that is an entirely normal, very human thing to do.

That's the real common theme. It isn’t about the sector – lettings or sales or commercial or proptech, premium or mid market, or anything else. It isn’t about the size of the business, nor the funding a business does or doesn’t have.

What unites them all, despite their differences, is that growth is entirely achievable, but only with a proper strategic plan in place.

And a proper strategic plan starts with an honest look at what's actually happening in the business, not what you assume is happening. An audit, if you like, to identify blockages, gaps, pitfalls and even bear traps.

That's genuinely difficult to do from the inside. When you're in a business every day, you're too close to see the wood for the trees. A consultation takes you out of the day-to-day for a period of time and lets you look at the whole thing objectively; systems, processes, people, cash flow, all of it.

All before a single pound gets spent solving the wrong problem.

Six months, dozens of businesses, but one recurring lesson: the fix is rarely as expensive as people think. But it’s not often where they're looking.

If any of this sounds familiar, the first step isn't a bigger budget. It's an honest audit of what's actually going on. Get in touch to book a consultation and find out where your growth is really being blocked.