The Growth Audit · sample deliverable
One executive document, five sections: where the money goes, where the journey breaks, where you sit in the market, what to spend, and the plan.
Sample Fictional composite
About this sample. Ridgeline Field Ops is not a real company. It is a composite built to show the structure, depth and reasoning of a growth audit without exposing any client's numbers. Every figure is fabricated but internally consistent — the funnel math, unit economics and budget all reconcile. Benchmark ranges are real, from published B2B SaaS data. A live audit replaces every number here with yours.
Executive summary
Ridgeline sells field service management software to independent HVAC and plumbing contractors. 310 customers, $1.49M ARR, eleven people, marketing run part-time by a founder who used to swing a wrench. The company is not short of demand. It is short of instrumentation — and it is quietly losing a third of every new cohort before that cohort ever pays back.
Three things are true at once, and the order matters.
One — the bucket leaks before it fills. 31% of new customers cancel inside twelve months, and the losses cluster in months two through five. That is not a marketing problem; it is an onboarding problem wearing a marketing problem's clothes. Spending more on acquisition before fixing it converts budget into churn.
Two — once it holds, they are badly underspending. A 6.4:1 lifetime-to-acquisition ratio and a 4.6-month payback is a company being far too careful. The benchmark floor is 3:1. Ridgeline is leaving growth on the table because nobody has ever done this arithmetic.
Three — half the channels aren't running. Referral converts at 25% and costs nothing, and no one owns it. Cold email produces the cheapest customers at $450 and gets 5% of the budget. LinkedIn produces the most expensive at $4,000 and gets 11%. The allocation is inverted.
The plan sequences it: instrument the funnel and fix activation in the first 30 days, rebuild the offer and reallocate spend through day 90, then add the two missing channels and scale through day 180. $135,000 of media and program spend across the arc, returning an estimated $547,000 in new first-year ARR. Our fee isn't shown in this sample — it's fixed, and sized on the call.
Section I
Every figure below is a monthly average across the trailing 90 days. This table did not exist before the audit — the numbers were spread across Google Ads, a spreadsheet, and the founder's memory.
| Channel | Spend | Leads | CPL | SQL | Demos | Won | CAC |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Google Search | $7,500 | 148 | $51 | 44 | 27 | 6.0 | $1,250 |
| LinkedIn Ads | $2,000 | 21 | $95 | 5 | 3 | 0.5 | $4,000 |
| Cold email | $900 | 38 | $24 | 14 | 9 | 2.0 | $450 |
| Referral / partner | $0 | 12 | $0 | 10 | 8 | 3.0 | $0 |
| Organic + direct | $1,600 | 31 | $52 | 11 | 7 | 1.5 | $1,067 |
| Total | $12,000 | 250 | $48 | 84 | 54 | 13.0 | $923 |
Media $12,000/mo + contractor $6,500/mo = fully loaded $18,500/mo. Blended CAC $1,423 — media-only CAC understates the true cost of a customer by 54%.
LinkedIn takes 17% of media spend and produces 4% of customers at $4,000 CAC — 2.8× blended. Cold email takes 8% of media spend and produces 15% of customers at $450 CAC — the cheapest in the mix. Referral produces 23% of customers at zero cost and has no owner, no incentive, and no tracking.
What to do
Pause LinkedIn, triple cold email capacity, and stand up a formal referral programme with a tracked incentive.
There are only four ways to get a customer: reach people who know you, reach people who don't, publish to people who know you, publish to people who don't. Ridgeline runs one and a half of the four.
| Mode | Status | Read |
|---|---|---|
| Warm outreach | Absent | 1,400 past leads and lost deals in the CRM, never re-contacted. Cheapest available volume in the business. |
| Cold outreach | Partial | Lowest CAC in the mix at $450 — funded at 8% of budget. Under-resourced, not under-performing. |
| Warm content | Absent | No newsletter, no owned audience. Nothing compounds; every month starts from zero. |
| Paid / cold content | Primary | 79% of budget. Search at benchmark and capped by budget at 31% impression share. |
What to do
Warm outreach first — no new budget, no new creative, no new audience. A list, a sequence, and a week of work: the fastest path to demo volume in this entire document.
Section II
The journey runs from first impression to renewed customer — and it breaks in two places. One is visible in the sales funnel. The other only shows up in cohort data, months after the deal was won.
Top of funnel is healthy: traffic converts at benchmark, leads qualify at benchmark, prospects show up. The loss is at the close.
Demos are run by whoever is free and follow no script. There is no qualification framework, no pricing conversation before the demo, and no written follow-up standard. 15.5% of SQLs close against a 20–25% benchmark — roughly four deals a month, already paid for and simply not collected.
What to do
One demo script, a pre-demo qualification form, a same-day written recap with pricing. Nothing here requires new headcount.
Customers who import their job history in the first week retain at 84%. The welcome experience works — when it happens.
Customers who never import retain at 51%. Only 43% ever import. The journey ends where the paper habits win.
Losses cluster in months two through five — after onboarding calls stop and before the customer has moved their scheduling off paper. This is the single largest number in the document, and it caps everything else: every dollar spent acquiring into a leaking cohort buys 69 cents of customer.
What to do
Make data import a done-for-you step inside the first seven days, gate the welcome sequence on completing it, and instrument an activation dashboard. Owner: Product + CS; marketing supports the sequence.
Section III
Ridgeline competes in a category with three tiers — and it is positioned against the wrong one. Win/loss notes show most lost deals do not go to a named competitor. They go nowhere: the contractor keeps doing what he was doing. The competitor is inertia, not software.
| Element | Today | Recommended |
|---|---|---|
| Frame of reference | Field service management software | The end of the whiteboard — dispatch that survives growth |
| Competitive alternative | Named software competitors | Paper, texting, and the owner's head |
| Who cares most | "HVAC and plumbing contractors" | 4–15 truck shops that just added a truck and broke their process |
| Value claim | "All-in-one platform" | Two more jobs per truck per week, without hiring a dispatcher |
| Proof | Three testimonials | Third-party-verified ROI study, named shops, real numbers |
The trigger event — adding a fourth or fifth truck — is the single most useful targeting variable available, and it is currently unused. It is observable from hiring posts, fleet listings and permit filings, which makes it the backbone of the outbound rebuild in The Plan.
| Lever | Now | Score | What moves it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dream outcome | 4 / 5 | Already strong — contractors want their evenings back | |
| Perceived likelihood | 2 / 5 | Verified ROI study, named shops, a 30-day value guarantee | |
| Time to value | 3 wk → 7 days | Done-for-you import, first dispatch in week one | |
| Effort & sacrifice | high → low | Ridgeline does the migration, not the customer |
Search ads, cold email, the website and the newsletter all end at "Book a demo." For a contractor who has not decided to change anything, a demo is a high-commitment, low-value offer — it costs him an hour to receive a sales pitch. There is no lower-commitment entry point anywhere in the funnel.
What to do
Build a diagnostic offer: a dispatch capacity calculator that asks six questions and returns the annual dollar cost of the shop's current scheduling. Low commitment, produces a number the contractor did not have, and qualifies him automatically. It gives cold email a reason to exist beyond asking for time.
Section IV
Before the numbers: the economics that justify them. Ridgeline believed its lifetime value was $16,400 — the figure you get by dividing one by blended churn, which is the most common way to be wrong about LTV, because a mature base hides what happens to new cohorts.
| Input | As believed | As measured | Why they differ |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly gross logo churn | 1.9% | 2.4% | Blended rate flattered by a stable legacy cohort |
| First-year churn | not tracked | 31% | Concentrated in months 2–5 |
| Average lifetime | 52.6 mo | 29 mo | Cohort-weighted |
| Lifetime value | $16,400 | $9,050 | −45% |
Read it together. Even after cutting believed LTV nearly in half, Ridgeline sits at 6.4:1 with a 4.6-month payback — more than double the 3:1 floor. The correct response is not to celebrate efficiency; efficiency this high almost always means underinvestment. But 31% first-year churn caps how fast that can be true. Growth cannot self-fund here — thirty-day gross profit per customer is $312 against a $1,423 CAC, so spend is financed from the balance sheet across roughly five months. That is why the ramp is staged, not switched on.
| Line | Today | Step 02 · d1–30 | Step 03 · d31–90 | Step 04 · d91–180 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Google Search | $7,500 | $9,500 | $13,000 | $15,500 |
| LinkedIn Ads | $2,000 | $0 | $0 | $0 |
| Paid social (test) | $0 | $0 | $0 | $3,000 |
| Cold email infrastructure | $900 | $900 | $2,600 | $2,600 |
| Content & organic | $1,600 | $1,600 | $1,900 | $2,400 |
| Software & instrumentation | $0 | $1,500 | $1,500 | $1,500 |
| ROI study (one-time, amortised) | $0 | $0 | $1,000 | $500 |
| Referral incentives | $0 | $0 | $1,000 | $1,000 |
| Monthly media & program | $12,000 | $13,500 | $21,000 | $26,500 |
The software line covers instrumentation the audit found missing: offline conversion tracking, cohort dashboard, call tracking. The stack was also checked for overlap — nothing to cut; the gap was tooling that doesn't exist yet, not tooling paid for twice.
On fees. Our management fee is deliberately not shown in this sample — it is fixed, sized on the call, and never blended into the media budget. Media, software and one-time assets are billed at cost. Every figure above is the client's spend, not ours.
Section V
The audit you have just read was step one: reality, mapped. The plan runs the next three steps of the same process — get alignment, improve pipeline, increase revenue — and then goes round again. Targets are set from current conversion rates plus only the improvements this plan actually funds; nothing assumes a step-change in product, pricing or headcount.
| Metric | Today | Day 90 | Day 180 | Mechanism |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| New customers / mo | 13.0 | 19.0 | 22.0 | Spend ramp + reallocation + close-rate fix |
| Media & program CAC | $923 | $1,105 | $1,205 | Rises with volume — efficiency traded for scale |
| SQL → won | 15.5% | 19% | 21% | Demo script, qualification, same-day recap |
| Monthly logo churn | 2.4% | 2.0% | 1.8% | Activation fix (Finding 04) |
| ARR | $1.49M | $1.63M | $1.85M | +24% in 180 days |
What would make us tell you to stop. If year-one churn has not moved below 26% by day 60, hold at step-03 spend and do not ramp. If SQL-to-won has not reached 18% by day 90, the constraint is sales capability, not lead volume, and more budget will make it worse. Both gates are written into the plan on purpose. The honest caveat: day-180 targets assume the activation fix lands by day 45 — the only item marketing cannot deliver alone. If it slips, the plan produces motion instead of growth.
Appendix
Paste the block below into any AI tool with the prompt that follows to continue this analysis, model alternative scenarios, or generate the assets the plan calls for. A live audit ships with yours filled in.
Prompt scaffold: "Below is a marketing audit summary in structured form. Act as a demand generation lead. Using only these figures: (1) model what happens to day-180 ARR if the activation fix lands 45 days late; (2) rebuild the step-03 budget assuming a $16,000/mo media ceiling instead of $21,000; (3) write the six questions for the dispatch capacity calculator, with the arithmetic that turns the answers into an annual dollar figure. Show your math and flag any assumption you had to invent."
Prepared by
Freddy Shelton
The Fifth · Lehi, Utah
freddy@thefifthmarketing.com
How a real one runs
A live audit is a fixed fee, sized on the call. You get this document with your numbers in it, a 90-minute working session, and the underlying model so your team can re-run it without us.