Half of Business Owners Can't Tell You Where Their Customers Come From
Drew asked me on the Brothers Frontier Podcast what actually stops small businesses from scaling. I gave him two answers, and the second one still surprises people.
Most businesses can't tell you where their customers come from
I sit in dozens of meetings a month, and somewhere between half and sixty percent of the entrepreneurs I meet have never identified a predictable lead source.
They get referrals occasionally. People find them online somehow. It's enough to keep going, so nobody stops to ask the question.
It baffles me every time. How are you in business without a deliberate way of finding new customers? But it's so common that it's clearly not a personal failing. It just never occurred to them that it was a thing to have.
Worth separating two terms people use interchangeably. A lead source is where the people come from: a trade show that reliably produces twenty conversations, a referral partner who sends you clients every month, a platform where your posts actually reach someone. Lead generation is the activity that turns that traffic into contacts.
Start asking every customer how they heard about you and a pattern appears within weeks. If Lisa has sent your last ten customers, you need to call Lisa, work out what she's doing, and probably put her on the payroll.
Then develop that source until you can attach a number to it. So many per week, so many per month, provable. Predictable is the word that matters. Once one source is running, build the next. Then another. That's how a business becomes something you can forecast rather than something that happens to you.
Check the numbers weekly, not monthly
Drew asked how often to review. We do a monthly, but I can't wait a month to discover we're struggling. By then it's too late to correct anything.
So: daily and weekly for leads, then week over week, month over month, quarter over quarter. For someone just starting, thirty days is a reasonable window to judge whether a new source is worth keeping — but check more often than you judge.
Get them off the platform
At networking events the instinct is always to connect on LinkedIn or swap Instagram handles. It's the wrong instinct.
You won't remember that person among a thousand followers. And the platform can disappear. Accounts get suspended, algorithms change, and governments occasionally decide an app shouldn't operate in their country. Build your entire business on someone else's platform and you're one policy change from starting over. I've had that happen.
Nobody can ban your relationship with someone. A phone number, an email address, a postal address — you own those. It's also far cheaper to send an email or a text than to pay a platform to show your own followers your own posts.
So the first objective with anyone remotely interested is getting them somewhere you control.
One fry at a time
Which brings us to landing pages, and the mistake almost everyone makes: putting everything on one page.
Give the page a single objective. Name, phone, email. That's it. I know you have five books, a course and twelve services. None of them belong there.
Then a second page with the next objective — usually enriching what you know. Watch how long they view a video, or ask a few survey questions. Are you solving this today, next month, next year? Can you afford what I charge? That tells me whether to drop everything and call you or send an email and move on.
It's how you'd feed a toddler chips. One at a time. Attention spans are short and choices are paralysing, so overwhelming someone with options means they poke around and leave.
And build for mobile first. Around eighty to eighty-five percent of website traffic is on a phone, so that's where the majority of your design effort belongs. Minimise text. People don't read books, don't read newspapers, barely read emails, and certainly won't read the wall of text on your homepage. Boil it to the pertinent part and make it interesting, even if the business is boring.
The other answer: automation
If you're not using automation, you're behind, and you probably won't have the business much longer.
There is someone in a garage or a closet or a basement right now working out how to do what you do automatically. That's not a threat, it's just arithmetic.
The reason most people don't automate isn't cost or complexity. It's that they've never mapped their own process, so the opportunities are invisible. That confirmation email you send every new customer, identical every time — you never think to automate it because it's a reflex rather than a step you've written down.
Which is also why the better entrepreneurs keep improving and the rest stop once something works. You get faster at the existing process but never ask whether the process itself should change. That's how you end up being Blockbuster when some punk kid comes along with Netflix.
The laser cleaning company
Ohio Laser Cleaning strip rust off tractors, conveyor belts, concrete and wood using lasers. They came to us saying they needed more customers.
I asked how they did what they did, got forty-five minutes of technical explanation, and said none of that fits on a postcard.
Their problem wasn't leads. It was structural. They couldn't explain the path from "customer has a problem" to "we solved it" in terms a layman could follow. Working through it forced them to segment every step, which made it easier to sell and — unexpectedly — gave their own team a map they'd never had.
A lot of entrepreneurs suffer from this. They make it far more complicated than it needs to be, and never sit down and work out how they actually make the thing they make. That's what stops them scaling.
There's a second benefit. Once your business is broken into modules, every module is a marketing message. Most marketing is just an excuse to stay top of mind, and you can't produce bite-sized messages about a process you've never articulated.
Listen to the full episode
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Ep. 33: How To Build a Business That Prints Money. Brothers Frontier Podcast with Drew, February 2025.
Owning the relationship rather than renting it from a platform is exactly what Ignite Funnels is built around.
