The Week One Diagnostic, and What It Usually Finds

This is the diagnostic to run in the first two weeks of ownership, before anyone changes anything. It takes days rather than months and it determines what the rest of the hold period is built on.

What to pull

Six things, all of which should exist and several of which usually don’t.

Fully loaded customer acquisition cost by channel, by quarter, for eight quarters. Loaded means agency fees and internal salary, not just media.

Stage-to-stage conversion: visitor to lead, lead to qualified, qualified to closed.

Retention and revenue expansion broken out by acquisition channel.

Marketing-attributed revenue for the trailing twelve months, alongside what the accounting system recorded for the same period.

Every marketing vendor contract with term, notice period and scope.

An inventory of who administers which accounts: ad platforms, domain registrar, analytics, CRM, website hosting, review profiles.

What to ask, and who to ask

Talk to sales before you talk to marketing. Ask where the last twenty closed deals actually came from, deal by deal. Not what the dashboard says. What the rep remembers.

Ask the person who runs marketing what they’d stop if it were their money. The answer, and whether they have one, tells you a great deal about whether the function has been managed or merely staffed.

Ask finance whether marketing’s reported contribution has ever reconciled to booked revenue.

And ask whoever holds the relationships which customers would leave if a specific person left.

The four findings that come up almost every time

The numbers don’t reconcile. Platform-claimed conversions plus CRM-attributed revenue exceed what finance recorded, sometimes by a multiple. Nobody is lying. Every platform counts a conversion it touched as one it caused. The consequence is that the target’s operating decisions were made on inflated information.

Fifteen to thirty percent of spend is undefendable. Not fraudulent, just unexamined. Running since before anyone measured, renewed by habit, defended by nobody in particular. This is the fastest margin available in the first year.

The funnel leaks somewhere nobody has looked. Because stage-to-stage conversion has never been calculated honestly, the worst step is usually a surprise. Often it’s lead to qualified, which means volume is being bought that sales won’t work, which means the reported cost per lead was never the real cost.

Key person and key vendor exposure. An agency holds the ad accounts. The founder holds the top relationships. The domain is registered to someone who left. These take minutes to discover and can take months to unwind after they become urgent.

What the difficulty tells you

If assembling these six items takes three people a week and produces contradictions, that difficulty is the headline finding.

It means nobody has been running marketing as a system, that the historical numbers in the data room were estimates, and that measurement has to be rebuilt before the growth plan can be trusted. That is a risk, and it’s also the clearest early value creation opportunity in the business, because companies that start measuring honestly generally find money within a quarter.

What to do with it

Write it up short. Baseline economics, the concentration risks, the undefendable spend with a number attached, the leak point, and the continuity exposures.

Circulate it before you change anything, so the baseline is agreed rather than reconstructed later from memory. Then sequence the work: accuracy, then margin, then growth. The hundred-day sequence.