Look at the last ten enquiries that came into your business. Not the clients. The enquiries. How many of them opened with some version of the same question, how much? If most of them did, you have probably already decided what the problem is. You need more enquiries, or better ones, or a proper funnel to sort the serious from the curious. More at the top, so more survives to the bottom. That reflex is almost always wrong, and it is expensive, because the enquiries are not too few. They are too broad. More reach, bought the way most founders buy it, simply manufactures more of exactly the enquiry you did not want.
The reflex is always more
When the enquiries are wrong, almost every founder reads it as a volume problem. Spend on ads. Widen the service list so more searches match. Say yes to everything to keep the top of the funnel full. The logic feels sound. If one in ten is any good, get a hundred and you have ten good ones.
The ratio is not random, though. The breadth that brings you the hundred is the same breadth that makes nine of them wrong. You are not filtering strangers down to the right ones. You are recruiting the wrong ones on purpose and then paying, in time and in attention, to turn most of them away. The funnel you are proud of is a machine for generating work you will decline.
A wide net catches what you don't want
A security firm I work with was spending about £60 a month on Google ads. Small money, and it did its job. Two hundred and six clicks, from searches like residential security near me, commercial security near me, event security near me. The enquiries that came back were a party in someone's back garden, a one-off that would never cover a licensed, accredited guard's rate.
The clicks were cheap, around £7 each, and that was the tell. A phrase is cheap to advertise against precisely because the person typing it has decided nothing yet. "Security near me" is not a buyer. It is someone at the start of a thought. The only thing they can compare, because it is the only thing anyone has handed them, is price. So they compare on price. And in security, the firm with the lowest rate and the guards who sleep on shift wins the click that was never worth having in the first place.
You can only be compared on price when you have handed a stranger nothing else to compare. — on buying broad reach
That is the part founders miss. The cheap enquiry is not a bargain. It is the market telling you that you are findable for a word that means nothing, next to everyone else who is findable for the same word, on the one axis that always sorts a crowd of equals.
The fix was subtraction
We turned the ads off. Not optimised them. Off, for three months, to see what the business looks like without them.
Then we took the effort that had been going into general blog posts, what is event security, how many guards do you need, the explainer content that sits at the top of the funnel, and pointed it at the searches only a real buyer makes. Event security London is one hundred and seventy searches a month and costs nearer £25 a click than £7. That gap is the whole argument. The phrase is dearer because the person typing it is further down the road and worth more at the end of it. Pages built by service and by area, so that someone looking for exactly what the firm is best at finds exactly that, and nothing generic.
Clicks bought from broad "near me" searches. Cheap, and almost none of them from anyone who was ever going to pay a licensed rate.
And on those pages, the rate, in plain figures: £18 to £30 an hour. Most firms hide the number and wait to be asked. Publishing it is the filter doing its work before an enquiry ever reaches a human. Someone who needs a guard for £12 reads it and leaves, and that is a win, because they were never going to be a client, only a conversation you lose an afternoon to. Someone who always expected to pay for accreditation reads it and arrives already sure. Fewer enquiries. The right ones.
Your version is quieter
For a security firm the wrong net shows up loudly. Garden parties, haggling, the lowest bidder taking the job. For most founders it is quieter, and worse, because it looks exactly like a healthy business. You are busy. The revenue is there. Nothing is on fire.
But the enquiries lead with price. The sales calls run long, because you spend the first forty minutes explaining what you actually do before you can even start on what they need. And the clients you win are harder than the work is worth. That is the same mechanism, running underneath a calmer surface. Your position is broad enough that the only people who can tell what you are are the ones who already know you. Everyone else arrives cold, puts you next to four others who use the same three words, and compares the five of you on the only axis you have left them.
So you reach for more reach. A new website, a content push, a junior hired to sort out the marketing. Every one of them pours more strangers into the top of a funnel that was built broad, and a broader funnel does not fix a breadth problem. It industrialises it. You do not have a lead problem. You have a breadth problem wearing a lead problem's clothes, and the more successfully you scale the reach, the more efficiently you manufacture the enquiry you keep complaining about.
One thing to do this week
Take those last ten enquiries again. Count the ones that led with price.
Then write a single sentence: who you are specifically for, and the specific thing you do, said plainly enough that at least three of those ten would have read it and known, before they ever contacted you, that you were not the cheaper option they were shopping for. If the sentence would have cost you three bad enquiries, it is working. If it would have cost you none, it is still too broad. You are not trying to build a bigger net. You are trying to build one that only the right person can get caught in.
That sentence is genuinely hard to write about your own business, because you are too close to the thing that makes you different to still see it clearly. That is most of what the Brand Clarity Workshop is for. Four hours, the founder, a written report. £1,500, fixed. Book it at kevaltanna.com/brand-clarity-workshop.