Free guide - Buy From Yourself
Twice a year, go be your own customer. Not a spot check. The whole thing, start to finish, the way a real client would hit it.
Most owners have never done this once, and it’s the cheapest audit you’ll ever run. Here’s how to do it so you actually get something out of it.
Before you start
Get honest, or get somebody who will be
This only works if you’re willing to see it badly. The problem is you built it. You know where the good parts are and your brain skips the rest. You’ll click through a clunky form and think “yeah that’s fine, I know what that means.”
A real customer doesn’t know what you meant.
So either you commit to being brutal with yourself, or you find somebody who will be. A friend who runs a business, a spouse, somebody’s kid. Send them through it and tell them to write down every single moment they were confused, annoyed, or waiting. That second option is better and it’s basically free.
Pass one
How they find you
List every way somebody can find you. All of them. Your site, your ads, Google, Instagram, referrals, that directory you forgot you’re on.
Then go through each one like a stranger would.
Write down what happened, and write down how it felt. You want both. The facts show you what’s broken, and honestly the feeling is what tells you which one to go fix first.
Pass two
How you deliver
Once you’re done with the marketing side, you’re gonna wanna do it again for the actual work. Onboarding, kickoff, the first couple weeks, the handoffs.
You’re looking for the seams. Where does the client get passed from one person to another? That’s where it breaks, every time, in every business.
Pass three
What happens after
The one everybody skips, and the one that costs the most.
What happens after the money clears? After the job’s done? Thirty days later?
For a lot of businesses the honest answer is nothing at all, and that’s where your referrals were supposed to come from.
The checklist
10 things to look for
Go in with this list. It stops you from just wandering around going “seems fine.”
- How long before a human answers. Not the auto-reply. A person. Time it.
- Whether the first message sounds like a person wrote it. Read it out loud. If you wouldn’t say it, don’t send it.
- How many times they repeat themselves. Every time a client has to say their name, their problem, or their address again, somebody on your side didn’t pass it along.
- Whether anyone tells them what happens next. Most anxiety in a client experience is just not knowing what’s coming. It’s free to fix and almost nobody does it.
- Dead ends. A link that goes nowhere. A form nobody watches. A phone number that rings out. Click everything.
- Whether it changes depending on where they came from. Somebody who got referred usually gets the good version. Somebody who clicked an ad gets the other one. And most of your leads are coming in through that second door, so that’s your actual client experience, not the referral one.
- The gap between the promise and the first real thing. What does the ad say, and what actually happens in the first ten minutes? If those don’t match, everything downstream is uphill.
- What happens when they go quiet. Stop responding halfway through and see if anybody follows up. Most of the time nobody does, and that’s just money sitting there.
- Where the waiting is. Not how long the whole thing takes. Where the dead air is, and whether anybody told them it was coming.
- What it feels like right after they pay. That’s the moment somebody’s most likely to wonder if they just made a mistake. And for most businesses it’s the quietest point in the whole process, which is pretty backwards when you think about it.
Writing it down
Two columns, that’s it
What happened
Facts. Waited 4 days for a reply. Had to fill out the same info twice.
How it felt
The honest reaction. “Felt like they forgot about me.” “Wasn’t sure if I’d done it right.”
Don’t fix anything while you’re going through it. You’ll get one step in, spot a problem, go fix it, and lose the thread. Write it all down first. Fix it after.
You’re gonna come out of this with a list of fifteen things and no time to do any of them. That’s pretty normal. So pick three. The ones where somebody was confused, or waiting around with nobody telling them what was happening. Those are almost always cheap to fix and they’re the ones actually costing you deals.
The real find
The part nobody expects
The thing that gets you isn’t usually one broken step. It’s finding out that your business does something you had no idea it did. A form that stopped working in March. A step your team quietly works around and never mentioned, because to them it’s just how it goes now.
That gap between how you think it runs and how it actually runs is the whole reason to do this. You’re usually not looking for one bad email. You’re looking for the places where the picture in your head went out of date at some point, and nobody had any reason to tell you.
Scale without the chaos
Ready to build a business that doesn’t depend on you?
Start with a call. We’ll find the bottlenecks and the dependencies that keep the business tied to you, and you’ll leave knowing what to fix first whether you work with us or not.