Every engagement we run starts with a diagnostic. Two weeks of auditing growth systems and revenue operations, looking for the gaps between where a business is and where it should be. After enough of these, patterns emerge.
Here are the five gaps we find in almost every business under $10M in revenue:
Gap 1: No documented sales process. The founder closes deals on instinct. It works, but it doesn’t transfer. Check: can you hand someone a document that describes every step from lead to close? If not, this is gap one.
Gap 2: Content without distribution. They’re creating content (sometimes good content), but it lives on a blog that gets 200 visits a month. No email list, no LinkedIn strategy, no repurposing workflow. The content exists. The engine to distribute it doesn’t.
Gap 3: CRM as a contacts database. They have a CRM. They put names in it. But there’s no pipeline stages, no follow-up automation, no deal velocity tracking. The CRM is a rolodex, not a revenue system.
Gap 4: No ICP definition. They serve "small to medium businesses" in their "industry." That’s not an ICP. That’s a target market. Without a specific profile, every marketing dollar is diluted and every sales conversation starts from scratch.
Gap 5: Founder as the bottleneck. Everything runs through one person. Every decision, every approval, every client touchpoint. The business can’t grow because the founder is maxed out, and the founder is maxed out because the business has no systems.
Score yourself: how many of these five gaps apply to your business? If it’s three or more, the systems aren’t the problem — the absence of systems is. And the good news is that every one of these gaps can be closed in 60-90 days with the right infrastructure.