Nine places a customer can be lost. We walk them in the order the customer meets them

9stations from discovery to repeat, each measured for how many customers drop

2–3weeks, fixed scope, findings as headings with the evidence under each

4hof your time in total: two interviews, one day of observation, read access to six months of data

Why the diagnostic comes before the spend

Advertising into a broken path buys expensive evidence of the problem

Response time is usually the constraint

Time to a human reply, in and out of hours, decides more enquiries than any campaign. We measure it with enquiries we place ourselves.

The buying path loses people before the sale

Steps, form length, what happens after submit. The clinic’s booking path, the hotel’s rate page, the store’s checkout.

Nobody knows the pricing position

Where you sit against the competitors a customer compares you with, offer by offer, and which offers carry the margin, is rarely written down.

What you receive

A document you can act on in an afternoon, and keep whether or not we do the work

Findings as headings

Read the first line of each and know what it says. Evidence, implication and recommended action under each.

A ranked plan

The three fastest-payback fixes first, with the measure each will be judged on.

A scope for what follows

Timeline, price and measures for the growth partnership, if you choose to continue.

What we cannot promise

A standard section in everything we write. The market, the engines and competitor pricing are not ours to control.

What we fixed. What changed

Ecommerce · Landing pages and conversion

Premium cookware brand, UK

+15%checkout completion rate, eight weeks

Shipping costs only appeared near the end of checkout and mobile customers were required to create an account before paying. We showed delivery costs earlier, made guest checkout the default and added Apple Pay and Google Pay.

Checkout completion increased 15% over eight weeks. Mobile revenue per visitor increased 12%.

Professional services · Landing pages and conversion

Mortgage brokerage, London

+21%initial consultations booked, one quarter

Visitors completed a long enquiry form and then waited for an adviser to contact them manually. We reduced the form to essential qualification questions, added adviser availability immediately afterwards and introduced automatic confirmation by email and SMS.

Initial consultations increased 21% over one quarter. Enquiry volume remained within 3% of the previous period.

Professional services · Analytics

Recruitment consultancy, Birmingham

£410kof pipeline traced to previously unclear sources

A large share of opportunities entered the CRM with either direct or unknown as the source, making channel reporting unreliable. We added self-reported attribution to enquiry forms, matched source data against CRM records and reviewed pipeline by first identifiable source.

£410k of pipeline was traced to referrals, industry events and partner introductions that had previously been grouped into direct or unknown.

See all cases

Market changes

What is changing in the markets we work in, and what a diagnostic tends to find first

Client turning the page of a bound report at a stone table

Software

Four findings appear in almost every diagnostic we run

Before strategy, a diagnostic. The four findings that surface in almost every mid-sized company we examine, why they hide from the inside, and the order in which to fix them.

News · 6 min read

Woman at a front desk answering the phone and writing in a diary

Clinics

A surgical patient costs about $610 to acquire, the highest in medicine

Patient acquisition cost by specialty in 2025–26, why it keeps rising, and the three places between enquiry and consultation where most of the money is lost.

News · 6 min read