Four areas where outside advice can have a big impact

When I meet with potential clients for Peatling Group, the obvious question is generally — "what can you do for us?" Honestly, I still don't know that I have a crisp answer to this. Instead, I usually say we "work on your biggest problem". We do that free of charge, in the hope that this will answer this slightly awkward question without me having to explain.

However, twelve months into running Peatling Group, I thought I'd try to set out what we've seen show up again and again where a few weeks of focused, structured work tends to generate returns measured in tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds.

1. Industrialise customer acquisition

Customer acquisition is — or should be — near the very top of a founder's list of priorities. Some companies we meet are proud to be "word of mouth" only. This is indeed something to be proud of; but in our view it is rarely the way to optimise your business's profitability and growth. Underinvesting in what turn out to be profitable customer acquisition routes is probably the number one mistake we see.

While some underinvest, other companies have a whole smorgasbord of avenues for finding new leads, but don't have a system in place for deploying them. A good customer acquisition strategy should look like a set of dials which can be adjusted as and when — to spend more or less in each area — in response to real-time changes in what your business needs, and the evolution of each channel's effectiveness. If that sounds like a lot of work; we find it's usually a lot less work than the alternative!

We sit down with the data and quantify customer acquisition cost (CAC) by channel and customer lifetime value (LTV) by segment. Once the numbers are proven, you can confidently spend more on the channels that work. You can reduce spending on the ones that the numbers suggest are not effective. Even more importantly, you can revisit the absolute investment you make in customer acquisition against industry-standard levels.

Adopting best practices in this area — so that you stop revisiting your sales strategy every Monday morning — can give your business better results, and give you back time.

See our Heritage Horticultural case study for details about how we work on customer acquisition.

2. Get serious about technology

Staying current with what software and AI can do for a small business is now close to a full-time job. For most founders that's a problem, because you don't have a spare full-time job. But the gap between businesses that are actively deploying modern tools and those that aren't is widening fast, and it will be hard to close later.

The wins are often unglamorous. A Xero rule that auto-categorises bank transactions and quietly saves an hour a week of admin. A workflow that drafts responses to standard customer enquiries before anyone touches a keyboard. A spreadsheet replaced with a small web app, built in a weekend, that does the job properly.

Increasingly, the more interesting work is bespoke. With AI coding tools, the cost of building a custom piece of software for a specific business problem has fallen dramatically. We've helped clients build their own scheduling apps, pricing tools and reporting dashboards — software that fits their workflow exactly rather than forcing them to fit some off-the-shelf product. Five years ago this would have been a £300,000 development project. Today it can mean a much smaller engagement and a working tool inside a month.

This is, like it or not, a race. The businesses that build the habit of deploying these tools will compound the advantage.

3. Take a hard look at pricing

Pricing is the single biggest profit lever in most businesses, and it is almost always the most overlooked.

Every time we have done a proper pricing review for a client, we have found money on the table. Sometimes prices have simply not tracked inflation — quietly losing fifteen or twenty per cent of margin since 2020 because nobody wanted to push an increase through. Sometimes the pricing mechanism itself was designed for how customers used to buy, not how they buy now. Sometimes there are obvious cross-sell or upsell opportunities that have never been packaged.

The instinctive worry is that customers will revolt at any change. In practice, well-considered pricing changes, which are communicated honestly and carefully, normally result in minimal backlash. Partly this is because customers know inflation is real. Partly it's because better pricing is rarely just "everything goes up." More often it's a tiered structure that lets larger customers self-select, a bundled offer that genuinely improves the proposition, or a different mechanism altogether — subscription, retainer, or value-based. In many cases customers appreciate getting additional control.

The other side to pricing is as a lever for you to push demand to where it suits you best. Charge extra for jobs done on the weekend — monetising the customer's wish rather than offering a blanket "yes" or "no" — or offer incentives for work booked in the low season. Pricing should be used as a tool to make your life easier.

Combined with the technology point above, even a ten-person business now has the tools to be as nuanced about pricing as a multinational. There's no excuse not to look at it hard once a year.

4. Make a plan, properly, with help

Most management teams know they should sit down and work out where the business is going. It keeps getting pushed back because the urgent always beats the important.

While it's one of the hardest things for us to get someone excited about(!), this is the area where outside facilitation helps the most. Not because the founder doesn't know the answers — they usually do — but because someone has to ask the awkward questions, hold the team to them, and capture what gets agreed in a form that survives the next month of operational chaos. Whether the work is plotting a long-term org structure that frees the founder to manage rather than fight fires, or simply establishing a new way of decision-making after a key person has left, there is no substitute for actually making the plan.

The output of a good planning process is not a fifty-page strategy document. It's a short, sharp hymn sheet that the whole team can sing from. When that exists, decisions get faster. Hires get easier, because everyone knows what kind of person the business needs next. The founder finally gets to delegate parts of their own job, because there is a shared answer to "what would the boss do?" that doesn't require the boss to be in the room.

Initially the process can feel like yet another sink on time. In practice, a clear, battle-hardened plan rapidly becomes an accelerant for the whole company. I've yet to meet a team that, having done this properly, regretted the time spent. The opposite, in fact — most wish they had forced themselves through it two years earlier.

Where to start

If any of these feels overdue in your business, get in touch. Contact us on contact@peatlinggroup.com.