Owners look for the channel — the one that works, the one that will finally produce a reliable flow of enquiries. They try it, judge it after six weeks, decide it does not work for their industry, and move to the next one. Ten years of that and the answer to where the work comes from is still: mostly word of mouth, and we are not sure.
The gravity wheel says something different. No single channel holds a business up. What produces steady enquiries is several channels, each individually unremarkable, all pulling the same buyer towards the same message.
What is the hub, and why does it come first?
The hub is what makes it a wheel rather than eight unrelated activities: one buyer, one message, one offer.
Write the hub in a single sentence: who it is for, what problem, what you do about it. If you cannot say it in a sentence, the spokes will each say something slightly different, and the buyer will assemble eight weak impressions instead of one strong one. Fixing the hub is free, and it makes everything downstream cheaper.
Why does one channel never hold?
There are three structural reasons.
Buyers do not decide in one place
Somebody hears your name from a colleague, looks you up, reads two pages, sees you have written something sensible, notices a review, and only then makes contact. Ask them where they came from and they will say “referral”. Remove the website and the reviews and the referral often stops converting. Every channel gets credit for the last click and none for the six things that made the click possible.
Every channel has a bad quarter
An introducer retires. An algorithm changes. A search update lands. Your best referrer sells up. Channels are not stable, and a business standing on one leg has a business risk.
Repetition creates trust, and repetition needs surfaces
The same message arriving from four directions builds a reputation, which is why a small wheel outperforms a single large channel.
Why does it matter to an owner?
Because channel concentration is a valuation issue as well as a lead-flow issue. A business where the bulk of the work comes from two introducers is worth measurably less than the same business with five working channels, and any buyer will establish that in a fortnight of due diligence.
And because the alternative to a wheel is panic. When the pipeline goes quiet, the owner without a wheel does something dramatic and expensive, usually in the worst possible month to be starting from cold.
How do you choose your spokes?
Choose by where your buyer already is, and by what you will still be doing in nine months when it has not worked yet.
It helps to sort spokes into two kinds. Harvest spokes reach people who are looking right now: search, referrals, a direct approach to a researched shortlist. They pay quickly and they stop paying the moment you stop. Build spokes reach people who are not looking yet: a monthly email, talks, a reputation, useful writing. They pay nothing for months and then keep paying for years.
A wheel made only of harvest spokes is feast and famine. A wheel made only of build spokes starves while it waits. Three spokes running properly, at least one of each kind, is a workable wheel for most small businesses. Beyond about five you will not sustain the cadence, and cadence matters most. A mediocre email sent every month for a year beats a brilliant one sent twice.
A worked example
The figures are illustrative. An owner turns over £600,000 across roughly 40 clients, with about 90 per cent of new work arriving through two introducers. One of them is in his sixties and has mentioned retiring.
The concentration number: something around £270,000 of annual revenue depends on one person’s continuing goodwill and health. There is no contract and no notice period.
Building a wheel from there does not mean abandoning what works. It means keeping the introducers deliberately — a proper quarterly conversation rather than an occasional lunch — and adding three spokes that run to a cadence.
The three spokes are a monthly email to the 480 people already in the address book, past clients and old enquiries included, at about two hours a month; one 45-minute talk a quarter to a room of the right people, roughly a day each including preparation; and six pages on the website, one per service, answering the questions asked on every first call, about a day each.
Add it up and the year costs somewhere near thirteen working days and very little cash. Against that, price the alternative: replacing £270,000 of revenue at short notice, from cold, in whatever month it happens to disappear.
How to use this in the next week
- Source every enquiry from the last twelve months. Do it by name, not by category. Then calculate what percentage came from your single largest source. That number is your risk.
- Write the hub in one sentence. Who it is for, what problem, what you do about it. Everything else waits until this exists.
- Count the spokes you are running. Running means a defined cadence you have kept for three months. By that test most owners have one or two, not the six they would list.
- Choose three and put them in the diary.
- Formally kill the rest. The half-run channel is worse than the absent one because it consumes attention and pays nothing.
- Measure enquiries per spoke, not activity per spoke. Impressions, followers and open rates are interesting. Enquiries are the only unit that pays wages.
Common mistakes
The first is adding spokes before fixing the hub. Eight channels each describing the business slightly differently produce eight weak impressions rather than one strong one. Fix the message first; it costs nothing and it makes every spoke cheaper.
The second mistake is judging a spoke on six weeks. Most channels that compound take three to four quarters to show. Six weeks of effort followed by abandonment, repeated across five channels over two years, is an expensive pattern, because you pay the setup cost every time and never collect the compounding.
The third is running everything at ten per cent. Eight channels done badly dilutes effort. Four spokes running properly will out-pull all eight of them.
Questions to ask yourself
- Out of 10, how comfortable are you with what happens if your biggest single source of work disappears this quarter?
- Can everyone in the business say the same sentence about who you are for and what you do?
- Which channel have you started, stopped and restarted more than twice, and what has that pattern cost?
- What would you have to do this month for a client to hear your name from three directions?
A marketing plan is a small number of spokes, a cadence you will keep, and one message to repeat, which is why this sits inside Business Coaching.