Strategy & numbers

Which customers are actually paying you

Revenue tells you who buys the most. It does not tell you who is worth serving.

Ask most owners for their top clients and you get a list ordered by turnover. It is the wrong list, or at least an incomplete one, because it measures what comes in without measuring what it costs to get it.

Two columns, not one

Put margin next to revenue and the order changes. Put effort next to margin and it changes again. Effort is the column nobody keeps: emails exchanged, quotes redone, meetings attended, chasing done, exceptions handled.

You do not need a time-tracking system to approximate it. Count the threads in the inbox. Count the quote revisions. Those two proxies are crude and they are enough to separate the accounts that buy from the accounts that consume.

What you usually find

A minority of accounts producing the majority of the margin, on a minority of the correspondence. And a tail of accounts producing very little margin on a great deal of it. The concentration is almost always sharper than people expect, which is precisely why the exercise is worth doing rather than assuming.

What to do about it — and what not to

The wrong conclusion is to fire the tail. Small accounts grow, they refer, and some of them are strategic for reasons the numbers do not show. The right conclusion is to stop serving them the same way. The heavy accounts deserve attention; the light ones deserve a process — a standard price list, a self-serve route, a template that removes the bespoke quote.

The goal is not fewer clients. It is a cost of service that matches what each relationship is worth.