Where Your Revenue is Hiding

Jun 03, 2026 • 4 min read

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Here’s a question for you – how much of your last quarter’s revenue came from relationships that were not in your CRM?

Most founders I ask can’t answer that question.

It’s not because they don’t know their firm – they do.
But they have never sat down and actually thought about this question before.

Here’s a twenty-minute exercise that does make you think about it.
No software.
No prep needed.
Just your leadership team and a whiteboard.

I’ve been suggesting it to professional services founders I work with for the last six months.

The pattern is the same every time.
They walk in confident they know where their growth comes from.
They walk out twenty minutes later having seen something they hadn’t seen before.

Let me walk you through it.

A few weeks ago I wrote about a structural problem I’ve been seeing in the software professional services firms use to manage relationships. It’s called the Relationship Blind Spot.

Most software only watches customers.
Your firm grows on six or seven other kinds of relationships the software can’t see.
The dollar cost of that gap is what I call your firm’s Revenue Gap.

We have built a calculator that calculates your firm’s Revenue Gap for you.

Calculate your Revenue Gap here →

This is the same problem but surfacing one layer up.
It shows up in the function every professional services firm is now being told to hire – Customer Success.

This calculator gives you a number.
But there’s also a diagnostic exercise that comes before the calculation.

It’s a twenty-minute exercise that reveals where your firm has been operating blind – before any tool, any spreadsheet, any new system.

Some founders need the number first.
Some need the exercise first.

Here’s how to run the exercise:

Block twenty minutes.

Get your leadership team in a room – your operating partners, your senior consultants, your heads of practice.

One whiteboard.
No laptops.

Step 1

At the top of the whiteboard, write your customer revenue from last quarter. The exact number. Or your best estimate. Don’t argue about it – just put it up.

Step 2

Below that, write the names of every other relationship type your firm depends on for growth.

Use this as a starter list:
Alumni.
Partners.
Referrers.
Advisors.
Ex-clients.
Prospects who said no.
The senior team’s own networks.
Add any relationship I missed that matter to your firm.

Step 3

For each non-customer type, write three columns next to it.
– Names. List the top 3-5 people in that category. By name. Yes, all of them.
– State. For each: warm / lukewarm / cold / haven’t checked.
– Revenue contribution last quarter. Best estimate of the dollar value attributable to that relationship.

Step 4

Look at the board.
This is where the exercise gets interesting.

Two things will happen.

The first is that someone in the room will say “we should probably be tracking this.”
Multiple people will say it.
This is the moment of Scope Blindness recognition.
Your team can name the relationships.
They cannot name the state.
They cannot estimate the revenue.

The second is that most cells in the matrix will be blank or filled with question marks.

Step 5

Sum the non-customer revenue column.

Compare it to your customer revenue from Step 1.

If you can even partially fill in the non-customer column – say you can fill 30% of the cells – you’ll see that the non-customer relationships contribute somewhere between 1x and 4x your customer revenue.

If you can’t fill most of the cells, you don’t know what you’ve been missing.

That’s Scope Blindness in its most visible form.

What the exercise tells you.

It tells you the shape of your firm’s actual growth surface – not just the slice you’ve been tracking.

It tells you who owns what. And where the gaps are.

It tells you which relationships have gone cold while you weren’t watching.

And it tells you that whatever revenue gap you can see on the whiteboard is conservative. The real gap – the one you’d see if you could fill every cell – is bigger.

That bigger number is your Revenue Gap.

This exercise reveals it qualitatively.

The calculator quantifies it.

If you’ve run the exercise – or even partially run it in your head while reading this – the calculator gives you the dollar number for your firm.

Calculate your Revenue Gap here →

90 seconds. Same logic as the exercise, automated.

One question for you:

While you were reading the list of relationship types – alumni, partners, referrers, advisors – did any of them make you think “we don’t really track that”?

Just reply with ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to this email.

I’m tracking which relationship types are most often the blind spots, and the pattern will shape what I write about over the next few months.

View More →

Where Your Revenue is Hiding

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