The 5 Business Death Traps by Kumar Dattatreyan

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The leads you keep turning off (and the number nobody calculates)

Why your best marketing channel might be quietly working right now


A residential electrician in a navy work shirt stands at a cluttered back office desk at dusk, looking at two phones side by side, one with a single old voicemail and one that just lit up with a new message, a loaded work van visible through the window behind her.


Hi ,


Teresa runs a residential electrical company outside Tulsa. Twelve trucks, about $2.1 million a year. Last October she had more work than her crews could handle, so she turned the ads off. Why pay for leads when the schedule is already full. Three months later, in January, the schedule was empty and she turned the ads back on in a panic. She spent $6,800 that month and signed three new customers. She had no idea if that was good or bad, because she had never once written down what a lead actually cost her.

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