You've never cracked new business. So stop trying.
The bit nobody says
Most owner-managed service firms are excellent at doing the day job, running the business, but have never built a repeatable way of winning new business. You've probably just fired yet another salesperson, so what do you do next?
Over 30 years I've held the sales director job, hired someone into it as an MD, and signed off the cost as a CEO. In my experience what usually happens is the salesperson sits there waiting for leads to come in, and you end up in the meetings anyway, because they haven't got your gravitas and because the prospect wanted to meet the owner in the first place.
I'm not saying you're the most polished. You probably haven't got the gift of the gab or the sharpest suit. But you ooze credibility, and you won't take on business you can see will turn into a headache in six months, whereas a salesperson will sell anything to close a bit of business.
So what you need isn't a salesperson
It's topping and tailing. Meetings booked in front of you, proposals written behind you, and you in the middle with a prospect over a cup of tea, which is where the magic happens.
That doesn't mean nobody in your business does sales any more. You might simply need a very good sales admin, or you might reduce your sales force to supporting this new way of selling.
Growth is where I start because it's usually what hurts. It's not the whole of what I build. I run Exec Office itself on the same stack, its finances, its outreach and its weekly reporting, so the growth engine is the first module and not the only one.
What the screen has found so far
I read filed accounts rather than buy lists. Three things showing up together in a company's own Companies House filings say more than any database field does: years running the business, some head count reduction, and no real change in revenues.
- Surrey firms screened
- 7,319
- All three signals
- 50+
- Target size
- 5–30
Owner-managed B2B service firms of 5 to 30 people, in Surrey and Hampshire.
I'm doing it on my own business first
From 7 September 2026 I'm running 90 days of new business work in public and publishing what happens every week, including the weeks it doesn't work.
There's nothing to buy here. No waiting list, no call to book. If you run a firm like that and you want to see whether it works before you ever talk to me, the log is the place to watch.