Find the money
Fifteen workflows where businesses lose money, each with the leak hypothesis to test in interviews. The rank is the product of six dimensions scored 1–5. A dimension is scored only from customer evidence; founder preference is not a score.
| # | Workflow | Where the money leaks (hypothesis) | Pain | Frequency | Budget | Urgency | Ability to pay | Repeatability | Rank | Evidence |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| — | Lead response | Leads that wait hours go to whoever answered first; the cost is the whole job. | · | · | · | · | · | · | unscored | 0 |
| — | Estimating | Site visits and take-offs done by the most expensive person in the company, often for jobs that never close. | · | · | · | · | · | · | unscored | 0 |
| — | Quoting | Slow, inconsistent quotes; margin lost to guesswork and unpriced scope. | · | · | · | · | · | · | unscored | 0 |
| — | Scheduling | Crews idle between jobs; customers rescheduled by phone; no view of capacity. | · | · | · | · | · | · | unscored | 0 |
| — | Dispatch | Wrong crew, wrong materials, wrong site; drive time nobody bills. | · | · | · | · | · | · | unscored | 0 |
| — | Procurement | Materials ordered late or twice; pickup runs during billable hours. | · | · | · | · | · | · | unscored | 0 |
| — | Labor utilization | Paid hours that are not on a job — the largest line in most trades. | · | · | · | · | · | · | unscored | 0 |
| — | Material waste | Over-ordering, off-cuts, damaged stock, returns never processed. | · | · | · | · | · | · | unscored | 0 |
| — | Change orders | Extra work done on a handshake and never invoiced. | · | · | · | · | · | · | unscored | 0 |
| — | Job documentation | Photos and notes on phones; disputes lost for lack of a record. | · | · | · | · | · | · | unscored | 0 |
| — | Customer communication | Status calls that interrupt the crew; reviews lost to silence after the job. | · | · | · | · | · | · | unscored | 0 |
| — | Invoicing | Invoices sent days after completion, or not at all for small extras. | · | · | · | · | · | · | unscored | 0 |
| — | Collections | Receivables ageing while the owner does the chasing personally. | · | · | · | · | · | · | unscored | 0 |
| — | Warranty | Callbacks with no record of what was installed, when, by whom. | · | · | · | · | · | · | unscored | 0 |
| — | Quality control | Defects found by the customer instead of by a checklist before handover. | · | · | · | · | · | · | unscored | 0 |