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Orange Jelly

a direction, not a verdict

find out why revenue is falling.

Takings are down week on week and the wage bill is not. What makes that hard to fix is rarely the fall itself, it's that nobody can say what is causing it. The cause is findable, and once you have it, everything after is easier to decide, quicker to do and cheaper to get right.

Let's talkHow we work

first, the honest part.

There's a point at which knowing the cause is not the thing you need next. If the business genuinely cannot pay its bills this month, the useful calls are to your accountant and to a licensed insolvency practitioner rather than to us. If you run a pub, your BDM and the Licensed Trade Charity (opens in a new tab) belong on that list too. They are better at that month than we are, and we'd rather tell you now than take the meeting.

Everything below is written for the ground just before that: a business still trading, still with money to work with, and sliding for reasons nobody has correctly identified. That version has options, and they are widest when somebody looks early.

the six that account for most of it.

It's usually one or two of these, rather than the economy and rather than everything at once. Each one is revenue the business is already capable of and is not currently getting, which is why it can come back. Read them as a shortlist to check your own numbers against, not as a diagnosis.

Nobody who could buy from you remembers you exist
Visibility decays quietly and nothing tells you it is happening. The enquiries do not stop, they thin, and the month it becomes obvious is nine months after it started.
One good week is propping up three bad ones
The monthly average hides it, so it goes unnoticed until a quarter does the arithmetic for you.
You're selling plenty and keeping very little
Busy and not much better off is a margin problem wearing a demand problem’s clothes, and the usual response, selling harder, makes it worse.
People commit and then don't turn up
A booking, a slot, an appointment, a quote accepted and then gone quiet. It was paid for twice: once when you held it, once when you filled it with nothing.
The team is doing by hand what a system should do
Nobody has time to fix the thing that would give them time, which is precisely how it survives a downturn that kills everything else.
Everybody has a different theory
The most expensive of the six, because it stops any of the others being addressed. Every week spent arguing about the cause is a week the cause continues.

what we would actually do.

A week or two of looking, properly, before anything is changed. The baseline first: revenue by week, by line and by source, where enquiries come from and where they stop, and what each one is worth. Then the one or two changes with the largest effect, built and measured against that baseline.

It's not fast in the way a promise is fast. It's fast in the way that stops you paying for the wrong fix.

what we would not do.

  • Sell you a marketing retainer for a margin problem.
  • Start before there is a baseline, because then nobody can tell whether it worked.
  • Keep going once the slide has stopped and the useful thing is done.

three times we did exactly that.

All three are The Anchor, our own venue. That's the whole of our evidence, and we'd rather say so than dress it up.

+828%Google Search visibility

Search Console clicks and impressions, at The Anchor.

Create demand
Nobody could find us
+403%Table bookings

Bookings taken at The Anchor, against the previous run rate.

Convert more
Interest that did not turn up
+98%Food revenue

Within three months, at The Anchor.

Protect margin
Busy, and not much better off

questions people ask first.

How quickly can you help?
There are two clocks here and it helps to separate them. The first is how soon you know more than you do now: that's one hour, free, going through what is actually happening, what you have already tried and what we would look at first. The second is how long the cause takes to find, normally a week or two of looking at real numbers, because a cause guessed at in a day is the one that gets fixed twice. We will not put a date on a web page that we cannot keep for everybody who reads it. If it's urgent, say so in your first line and we'll treat it that way.
What if we cannot afford help right now?
Say so early. It changes what we would recommend, not whether we will talk to you. The first hour costs nothing, so the money question only applies to what comes after it, and by then you will know what the problem actually is. There is no price on this site because every engagement is scoped to the problem and agreed in writing before anything starts, and a business with less room than usual is exactly the one that should not be sold a large programme. Sometimes the honest recommendation is a small piece of work. Sometimes it is that you now know enough to go and do it yourself.
Do you work with all types of business?
Yes, within one limit. The six causes above behave the same way in a professional services firm, a trade business, a shop and a venue, because they are about demand, margin, conversion and systems rather than about what you sell. Where it does not transfer is anything needing sector accreditation or technical knowledge of your field. If that is you, we will say so inside the first hour and point you at someone better placed, rather than take the work.
What makes you different from other consultants?
We look before we propose. It is easy to arrive with the answer already chosen and treat the diagnosis as a formality on the way to it, and that is how businesses end up paying for the wrong fix. We would rather spend a week or two finding out and then tell you the job is smaller than you feared. That is easier to say when you run a business yourself: The Anchor is our own venue, a real trading business with a wage bill and suppliers, and everything on this site was tested there before it was offered to anybody.
What if it does not work?
We agree the measure and take the baseline before anything is built, so that question has an answer rather than an argument. We stay close through the first month, review against the baseline rather than against activity, and change direction when the number says to. If it is not moving we will say that too.

you don't have to guess at this.

Bring us what's happening, what you've already tried, and what everybody thinks the cause is. The first hour is free, and you leave it with a clearer view of where to look than you came in with. If we're not the right people, we will say so inside that hour and point you at who is.

Let's talk