I noticed that a funny thing happens when revenue drops: everyone turns into a detective. They inspect the landing page, rewrite the offer, panic-post on LinkedIn, rearrange pricing, add a bonus nobody asked for, and so on.

It’s all basically business seance. Because it usually starts from the same assumption: “Something is wrong.”

This is a verb tense problem: something isn’t wrong right now. Something was wrong in the past — usually 30-120 days ago, depending on the length of your sales cycle and your business seasonality.

I get where this misconception is coming from: revenue is THE thing we use to measure business health. (Side-note: profit is a better metric.)

But looking at money isn’t the way to diagnose problems because revenue is one of the last things to tell you the truth. By the time your Stripe dashboard starts looking like a Victorian tragedy, the real cause has already happened.

That prospect you should have followed up with? That referral system you never built? That audience growth you postponed because “client work is busy”? That offer change you ignored because people were still buying the old version?

That was the problem. What’s happening today is just the invoice.

I’ll walk you through how to identify everything in a second. Before that, I want to point out something: when one of the things above isn’t working, it’s usually an inner problem.

Now I’m neither a coach nor a therapist, so I won’t tell you what you need to fix and how to do it. My friend Bryan Yates is, though. He’s THE person who can help you cut through your own BS.

Every time his newsletter lands in my inbox, I want to reply “stop outing me!” because it feels like it was written for me. If you’re curious about what kind of magic makes this possible, read on.

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I’ve never met anyone who can tell you exactly what you need to hear, whether it’s what you want to hear or not. Until Bryan.

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Whenever I had a launch underperform, the post-mortem revealed that the launch itself was NOT the problem. In most cases, I did everything right during the launch window.

However, I did drop the ball on occasion before the launch. Typically, what I did poorly was the pre-suasion part of any launch, which needs to happen way before you tell people they can buy something new.

(My launch playbook; I still use it every time with minimal tweaks.)

When things don’t go my way, I tend to look at the landing page, the price, or the emails I sent too.

But those are lagging indicators

Sure, you can always improve your copy and add an extra discount. BUT if you already have the trust of your audience, those shouldn’t matter too much.

By the time you actively sell something, they have already decided whether they need it or not.

This is why

You should look at leading indicators instead

A few of them are:

Pipeline quality
Sales conversations
Qualified inbound leads
Referral velocity
Newsletter subscriber quality
Reply rates
Retention
Time-to-close
Sales cycle length

Please do NOT look at all of them. Choose the ones that matter to you.

In my case, newsletter subscriber quality and retention are the top choices, because email is my best channel. For many people in The Council, though, the number of sales conversations and the pipeline quality matter way more than email list health.

Their growth engine is different.

Whatever you choose from this list, these are your early warnings. They are far less glamorous than Stripe curves, which is why people ignore them.

Nobody wakes up excited to track “percentage of warm leads who disappeared after proposal.”

But waiting for revenue to tell you there’s a problem is like waiting for smoke to confirm the kitchen fire.

Boring always wins

I’ve said it before, I stand by it, and now I have new arguments to support it. We recently got our outreach strategy upgraded in a mini-sprint in The Council.

Three badass guest speakers spoke on different topics but they ALL reached similar conclusions:

Talica Davies talked about sales frameworks and how pre-qualifying and sending the boring pre-call email matters A LOT.
Alison Knott talked about crossing the bridge between marketing your expertise and booking calls, with an emphasis on how important follow-up is.
Zsike Peter showed us how to use Sales Navigator without cold pitching into the void and emphasized that THE make-or-break aspect is how long you spend tinkering with the filters and then doing the boring work of commenting and following up.

None of these is a fun, shiny thing to do. They’re all boring AF and, to some of us, “soul-sucking” (actual quote from Council members).

Yet, this is what pays the bills. And doing things like this consistently is what keeps you away from feast-and-famine cycles.

Attention is a loop, not a funnel, which is one of the many reasons why you should keep doing the boring stuff — you want to stay top of mind for when the people in your orbit are finally ready to buy.

The diagnostic question that matters

When revenue dips, ask this first: “What did I stop doing 90 days ago?” That question is worth more than most dashboards.

Did you stop:

Publishing consistently?
Asking for referrals?
Having sales conversations?
Making clear offers?
Nurturing warm leads?
Checking whether your offer still matches market demand? (use Demand-O-Meter for free to figure that out)
Creating opportunities for people to buy?

Most problems live there. People rush to optimize copy when the actual issue is that they disappeared for six weeks and expected the market to keep sending flowers.

Markets are needy like that.

Your 90-day revenue audit

Here’s how to stop diagnosing the wrong quarter. First, look at what your business needs in order to grow.

Next,

Pick 3–5 metrics that predict revenue for your business.

For most consultants and solopreneurs, they’re a combination of:

qualified conversations started
proposal-to-close rate
newsletter subscriber quality
reply rate from warm outreach
referral introductions per month
sales cycle length

Track those weekly. Yes, weekly — you need time to course-correct, which is why weekly makes more sense than monthly or quarterly.

Build a maintenance rhythm

Recurring revenue loves recurring behavior.

Listen, I know that running a business when you wear all the hats is DAMN HARD. It often feels like you don’t even have the time to do the bare minimum, let alone all the nice-to-haves.

Yet, when you don’t work ON your business, you feel it 90 days later or so.

This is why I encourage you to create fixed rhythms for:

follow-up
referrals
newsletter publishing
audience growth
offer review
relationship maintenance

Just don’t go about it based on “best practices” or someone else’s goals. It’s very likely they do not fit your schedule.

Instead, think about your busiest week and use that as the framework. How much outreach can you do during a busy week? What about content? What about relationship building?

This is your ongoing goal and the thing you will measure every week, NOT what someone else says is the norm.

Finally, ask harder questions

Sometimes the issue isn’t execution.

Sometimes the offer is stale. Sometimes the positioning drifted. Sometimes the market changed while you were busy optimizing button colors.

Fun.

This is where an external perspective matters, because sometimes you do not need more tactics. You need someone to tell you which problem is actually costing you money.

If your pipeline feels suspiciously quiet, your revenue feels fragile, or you’re too close to the business to diagnose the real issue, ASK someone you trust. You can do this in a community, you can work with a consultant, or you can reach out to a friend. Whatever you choose, get someone to help you figure out what actually needs fixing before you spend three weeks rewriting your About page.

🎙️ My podcasts, interviews, and more

I went on the Trash Talks podcast with Erica Breuer and Erin Thomas to demystify some of the shiny promises influencer make. We talked trash about the scaling myth, the path to unmeasurable riches and more.

It’s one of my favorite podcast episodes because the conversation was raw and unfiltered. Tune in here!

Need me in your corner? Here’s how I can help you:

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