Your report isn't one consultant's opinions.
Every StrayRev diagnostic follows the same written method, start to finish. What goes in your report doesn't depend on mood, hunches, or what's easiest to sell you. This page is the short version of that method.
Watch an ordinary purchase fail.
A homeowner's water heater dies on a Tuesday morning. By 8:15 she's searching for a plumber. She finds three. The first has a site that loads slowly and never quite says whether they handle water heaters, so she leaves. The second looks capable, but the contact form wants eleven fields she doesn't have time to type, so she abandons it halfway. The third lists a phone number at the top of the page. She calls, someone answers, and by that evening the third plumber has been paid.
Now consider what the first two businesses lost, and notice what it was not. It was not a marketing failure. Their marketing worked perfectly: it produced a qualified customer actively trying to give them money. What failed was everything after the marketing.
Revenue is rarely lost. It strays: at particular moments, for particular reasons, that leave particular evidence.
What disappears cannot be recovered. What strays can be followed, found, and returned. A business that believes revenue disappears keeps buying water for a leaking bucket. A business that understands revenue strays can finally ask the only question that recovers it: where?
StrayRev exists to find where revenue strays and return it to the businesses that earned it.
The last word is the one that matters. If you run a good business that people are already finding and trying to hire, the revenue we recover was already yours in every sense but one: someone intended to give it to you, and something in the path prevented it. Our job is to find what.
What your diagnostic is held to.
These rules bind every diagnostic performed under the StrayRev name. Several of them cost us easy money or easy findings. That's how you can tell they're rules and not slogans.
We diagnose progression, never objects.
A website is not good or bad. A form is not long or short. Objects have no value apart from their effect on a customer's forward motion. The only question we ask of anything is whether it moves your customer forward or causes them to drift.
Evidence over opinion.
A finding does not exist until it is proven. Every leak is anchored to something observed, measured, or experienced that another person could verify independently. A StrayRev report must never contain a sentence a client could reasonably answer with “says who?”
Never more marketing before better conversion.
The business pays acquisition costs on every customer, including every one who strays. Every leak is amplified in exact proportion to marketing spend. The path gets repaired before it gets filled.
Findings are written from inside the customer's experience.
Not “the call-to-action is weak,” but “a customer ready to act cannot immediately see how.” The first is an opinion about a button. The second is a diagnosis, and only one of them can be defended with evidence.
The six stages every customer walks.
The Path describes your customer's journey from need to purchase. Technology changes where the evidence lives; the journey itself doesn't change. Every finding in every StrayRev report is located in exactly one of these stages.
Discover
A need appears and the customer starts looking. The question at this stage is simple: when your customer goes looking, are you findable at the moment of need, and do you appear as an answer to their problem, not just a name on a list?
Understand
The customer works out whether you do the thing they need. Momentum breaks here when a page never quite says whether you handle their exact problem, their area, their situation. Confusion doesn't make customers ask. It makes them leave.
Believe
The customer decides whether you can be trusted with the job. Reviews, evidence of real work, signs of a real operation. Belief isn't won by claims; it's won by proof the customer can check.
Engage
The customer tries to make contact. This is where the most expensive leaks live: numbers that don't dial from a phone, forms that demand too much, booking flows that break. A customer at this stage is actively trying to give you money.
Experience
The customer judges what happens when they reach out. Does someone answer? How fast? What does the response tell them about what hiring you will be like? Every unanswered call is a customer released back into the market.
Convert
The customer commits, schedules, and pays. Even here, momentum can break: quotes that never arrive, scheduling friction, silence after a yes. The stage isn't complete until the work is booked and the payment path is clear.
See where your customers stray.