In a large company, business development is a job title. In an owner-managed business it is a set of five numbers: how many enquiries you get, what share of them buy, what the average sale is worth, how often a customer comes back, and what you keep out of every pound after direct costs. Multiply the first four and you have revenue; apply the fifth and you have gross profit. Every growth idea you will ever hear moves one of the five.
That framing matters because it turns growth from a mood into arithmetic. Most owners arrive at the subject saying they need more leads. Once the five numbers are on the table, more leads turns out to be the most expensive of the five and rarely the one that is actually binding.
The five, with the question each one asks
- Enquiries. How many genuine opportunities reached you last month, and where did they come from? Not website visits — people who asked.
- Conversion. What share of those became customers? Most owners guess high. Count it for one month and the guess usually moves.
- Average sale. What does a customer spend the first time? The fastest movement here comes from what you include and what you stop giving away.
- Frequency. How often do they come back in a year? This is the one that gets forgotten, and it costs nothing to work on compared with finding somebody new.
- Margin. What do you keep after the direct cost of delivering? A point of margin is worth more than a point of revenue, every time.
Why small movements beat big pushes
The five multiply, so a modest improvement on several of them compounds into a number that looks implausible from a standing start.
An illustration, not a client. A business takes 400 enquiries a year, converts 25% of them, and the average customer spends £900, which is £90,000 of revenue at a 40% gross margin, so £36,000 of gross profit. Improve three of the five by 10% — 440 enquiries, 27.5% conversion, £990 average sale — and revenue becomes £119,790. Lift margin from 40% to 44% as well and gross profit becomes £52,708, which is 46% more than the £36,000 you started with. Nothing in that list requires a new product, a new hire or a rebrand. It requires four small changes held for a year.
The same arithmetic is why chasing one big idea usually disappoints. A single lever moved 10% is worth 10%. Four levers moved 10% is worth nearly half as much again, and each of the four is small enough to actually finish.
Choosing the one to start with
Work top down and take the largest number you can move this quarter. In most owner-managed businesses the order is margin, then average sale, then conversion, then frequency, and leads last. Margin and average sale land in profit immediately and cost nothing to change beyond the nerve to have the conversation. Conversion uses enquiries you are already paying for. Leads are last because more of them, poured into a process that loses two thirds, produces more work at the same profit.
The exception is a business whose enquiries have genuinely stopped, where nothing else matters until that is fixed. Be honest about which of those you are, because “we need more leads” is the most comfortable diagnosis available and it is wrong more often than it is right.
The 90-day sequence
- Weeks 1 to 2. Get the five numbers on one page, from your own records. Imperfect figures are fine; absent ones are not.
- Week 3. Pick one lever, and write down the target and the date. One, not three.
- Weeks 4 to 11. Do the work and hold it through the uncomfortable middle, when a price change is still washing through the order book.
- Week 12. Re-measure all five, decide whether it moved, and pick the next one. That is the quarterly rhythm behind Performance on Purpose.
If you want the numbers for your own business before you start, the Profit Improvement Calculator takes the five and shows what each small movement would be worth. The Five Ways explains the model behind it, and Business Coaching is the same work done fortnightly with somebody asking what happened.
Andy Jackson is Co-Founder of Buzz and the author of Performance on Purpose: build the person, develop the leader, improve the business. He writes about the method at andyjackson.com, where the courses and books sit alongside it.
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Frequently asked questions
Is business development just another name for sales?
Sales is one of the five numbers and it is the one owners reach for first. Business development is the whole set: how many enquiries arrive, what share of them buy, what each sale is worth, how often they come back, and what you keep out of every pound. A business can grow substantially without a single extra enquiry by moving the other four, and in an owner-managed business that is usually the cheaper route because it uses customers and capacity you already have. Treat selling as one lever among five and the plan gets both simpler and less expensive.
Which of the five should I start with?
Start where the arithmetic is largest and the change is quickest, which is almost always margin or average sale. Both land in profit immediately, neither needs marketing spend, and both are within your control this month. Conversion comes next, because it uses enquiries you are already paying to generate. Leads come last for most owner-managed businesses, since more of them into a leaky process produces more work and no extra profit. The exception is a business whose enquiry flow has genuinely dried up, where nothing else matters until that is fixed.
How long does a growth push take to show in the numbers?
A pricing or margin change shows in the month it lands, then works through the order book over the following quarter. Conversion changes show within about six weeks, because you are dealing with enquiries already arriving. Anything that depends on generating new demand takes longest, typically two to three quarters before it is more than noise. Set the expectation before you start, because most owners abandon a correct change at week five, when the early numbers are still mixed and the temptation to try something else is at its highest.
Do I need to spend more on marketing to grow?
Not until the rest of the process can handle what you already get. Work out what share of last year's enquiries turned into customers and what an enquiry is worth once it does. If conversion is under a third, spending more on generating enquiries is buying more of something you are not yet converting. Fix the response time, the quoting and the follow-up first, then spend, and spend on the channel that produced your best customers rather than the one that produced the most enquiries.