The 6-Gap Revenue Map™
A free diagnostic that follows the path from a search to a booked job, and shows which of six stages costs you the most. Five are gates. Each keeps a share of the people who wanted what you sell.
Example scan · a composite contractor
GAP 6 · Attribution is not a gate — it’s the flywheel. It decides whether next month’s 10,000 do better than this month’s.
Why these six, and not someone’s theory. Andrew ran a dealership’s entire lead-to-sale engine for 26 months, with every lead tracked to the sale.
The founder’s operator record — 26 months, every month documented.
The instrument
The money side is arithmetic on four figures you already have. The gate scores are six questions you answer about your own business, graded against floors we publish below. It is a self-assessment; the ranking is the part worth acting on, not the dollar figure.
Four numbers you already have · three minutes · no email
Everything: ads, agency, tools, directories.
Calls and forms that were real enquiries.
Best estimate is fine.
Pick your trade above for a starting figure.
When someone nearby searches for what you do, where do you land?
Before they call, what do they find when they check you out?
What does your site actually ask a visitor to do?
How fast does a new lead hear from a real person?
After the estimate goes out, what happens?
When a job closes, do you know which marketing produced it?
Nothing is sent anywhere. This runs in your browser.
Cost per booked job
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Booked jobs / month
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Revenue / month
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Your five gates, lowest first
The Gap Review is 20 minutes on a shared screen with your own numbers in front of you. It’s free, there’s no second call where a price appears, and you leave with the ranked list whether or not you ever work with us.
Book a 20-minute Gap ReviewWhere the six gaps live
A lead is wholesale. A booked job is retail. Most agencies stop at wholesale.
What the six are
A gate is a place where people who wanted what you sell stop moving toward you. Each one keeps a share, and because they sit in a line, they multiply.
Two different numbers describe a gate, and it is worth keeping them apart. The rate is what actually happens — 12.7% of searchers reached your site. The score out of 100 is how good that is. The map above shows rates. The map you run below gives you scores, because you know your own setup better than you know your pass-through percentages. A score is not a percentage and this instrument never converts one into the other behind your back.
Not a gate — the flywheel. It decides whether next month’s searches do better than this month’s, because it tells you which of the five to spend on next. How we trace a job to its source →
The floors, published
A tool that grades you against secret benchmarks is a sales device. Here are the floors this instrument uses, where each one comes from, and how much weight it deserves.
| Gate | Published range | Where it comes from | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Speed | 35–85% A real human response inside 5 minutes |
Lead Response Management study (Oldroyd & Elkington) and Harvard Business Review, The Short Life of Online Sales Leads, 2011 — the origin of the figures the rest of the industry paraphrases. | High. Replicated, primary, and old enough to have survived scrutiny. |
| Conversion | 18–34% Varies by how the lead arrived |
Trade-published close-rate ranges — for example roofing at roughly 30–40% on pre-qualified leads against 15–25% on cold canvassing. Your own figure always overrides ours. | Medium. Trade sources are self-reported and rarely state a sample size. |
| Visibility | 4–32% Top-three local placement on your core service terms |
Click-share by position from published SERP studies, applied to the local pack. | Medium. Position-to-click curves move with every AI-answer change. |
| Trust | 1.2–4% More than one way in, at least one of which answers instantly |
Site conversion ranges for home-service categories, plus what we see in our own client analytics. | Low to medium. Published site-conversion figures vary so widely they are directional only. |
| Authority | 55–88% Reviews, real project evidence, and answers to the questions buyers weigh |
No credible public benchmark exists. Scored qualitatively against what ranking and cited competitors actually publish. | Judgment. Named as judgment rather than dressed up as data. |
| Attribution the flywheel, not a gate |
Every booked job traced back to the marketing that produced it | Not a benchmark — a binary. Either a job can be traced to its source or it can’t. This is the one layer where 100/100 is a reasonable expectation rather than an ambition. | Not applicable. Attribution is scored but deliberately left out of the lever, because it moves nobody through the chain. It tells you where to aim next. |
How a score becomes a rate. Your score places you inside the published range above, and that is the pass rate the map uses. It is why the worst-looking score is often not the one worth fixing — a narrow range moves the real number very little.
What it will not do. It will not claim you are losing some percentage of your leads, and it will not put a dollar figure on anything you did not type in yourself.
Questions
The 6-Gap Revenue Map is a diagnostic that traces the path from someone searching for your service to a job on your books, and identifies which of six stages is costing you the most revenue. Five of the six are gates that each keep a percentage of the people who wanted what you sell: Visibility, Authority, Trust, Speed and Conversion. The sixth, Attribution, is not a gate — it decides whether next month’s spend performs better than this month’s.
Inside five minutes, with a real person. The research behind this is unusually solid: the Lead Response Management study and Harvard Business Review’s 2011 analysis both found that qualification odds fall off a cliff within the first hour, and steeply within the first few minutes. Most of the dramatic figures circulating in contractor marketing trace back to those two sources.
It is also the cheapest gate to fix. It costs no media spend — only a process.
Because the gates multiply rather than add. Six people out of ten getting through five gates in a row is not six-tenths of your revenue — it is six-tenths of six-tenths of six-tenths, five times over. Which means the difference between a gate at 34 out of 100 and a gate at 40 out of 100 is far larger in booked jobs than six points sounds.
It also means the map does not reward perfectionism. It models your lowest gate lifted to 78 out of 100 — good, not flawless — because that is the real size of the prize, and it is usually enough to change the business.
No, and the difference matters. An audit is something we do to your account and hand back. This is something you run yourself, in your browser, in about three minutes, and nothing you enter is sent anywhere or collected.
If you want a second pair of eyes on it, the 20-minute Gap Review is free: your numbers on a shared screen, worked through by the person who built the instrument. You leave with the ranked list whether or not you ever work with us, and there is no second call where a price appears.
Four figures, and best estimates are fine: what you spend on marketing in a month, how many real enquiries that produces, roughly what share of them become jobs, and your average job value. If you are unsure on any of them, enter your best guess — the ranking of your gates is far more stable than the dollar figures, and the ranking is the part that tells you what to do.
Ask an owner where his marketing leaks and he’ll usually name the right gate inside ten seconds. Ask him what it costs him in booked jobs a month and the room goes quiet. That number is the whole difference between a worry and a decision — and it takes three minutes and no email address to get it.
Or start from the top: see every service and find your starting point →
No form. No sales team. No callback queue. Every channel below goes straight to Andrew.
423-299-1718 · Johnson City, TN · The person you reach is the person accountable for your results.