Where the leaks are
If your business does $1M–$50M and you don't know where it's bleeding, you don't have an AI problem. You have a measurement problem.
Most operators we talk to know something is leaking. They can't say where. They've got a hunch it's the office. Or sales. Or that one manager who never replies on Slack.
Hunches don't get fixed. Numbers do.
The three places it usually is
We've now run the same diagnostic on 60+ businesses in the $1M–$50M band. The leak is almost always in one of three places. It's almost never where the founder thought.
- First-touch latency. The minutes between an inbound and a human reply. This is the silent killer in service businesses.
- Second-touch follow-up. The job that goes from quote sent to quote forgotten in 48 hours.
- Internal handoff. The moment a job leaves one person's queue and lands in another's. This is where most ops time goes to die.
The diagnostic
Don't try to instrument everything. Pick the three numbers that map to the three leaks above. Track them weekly for four weeks before you build anything.
Most operators skip this and go straight to building agents. Then they wonder why the agent didn't move revenue. The agent worked. It just plugged the wrong hole.
Plug the right hole. Most of this work isn't AI. It's seeing the leak clearly.
What we'd do if we were you
Spend a week measuring before you spend a quarter building. Then come find us. Or don't. Either way: measure first.