The most profitable thing I do is talk clients out of work

A trading system that made more money by placing fewer bets

A tennis trading engine I built for a client runs two models, one for the men’s tour and one for the women’s. On the women’s side we added a language model as a filter and it declined eleven positions the maths would have taken.

The win rate fell by three points. The return rose by more than two. The filter never made a single better call. It declined eleven that looked fine and paid badly.

That is the whole idea in one measurable place, on a market that settles within hours. Every business has the same filter and almost none of them switch it on. No report carries a line for the money you did not waste.

The cheapest source is the one to check first

Two separate clients, a home-services firm and a studio, both had a cheapest lead source that looked excellent in the account. In both cases those were the leads that never bought. One of them was bringing people who thought they had booked a gym.

A cost per lead stops at the form. Whether that person understood the offer, could pay, or wanted the thing you sell is decided afterwards, somewhere the dashboard cannot see.

Two hundred pages that said no

A Turkish agricultural group asked whether the United States was worth entering. Two months on the product line, the market, the paperwork and the money, and the answer was no. The work redirected the budget to Europe and Africa instead.

A separate aerospace programme sold only after we cut its scope in half. The client was capable of building all of it. That was the problem.

Why nobody else will tell you this

An agency is paid to run the spend, a freelancer to produce, a hire to cover a function. Every one of them can be doing good work and none of them can afford to say stop.

Nobody here is being dishonest. It is arithmetic, and it means the person who tells you to do less has to be someone whose income does not go down when you do.

What to do with this on Monday

Take your cheapest acquisition source and call ten of the people it brought you. Ask what they thought they were requesting and what they expected to pay.

Then take the largest thing currently in progress and ask what would happen if you shipped half of it. If the honest answer is that half would do, the other half is costing you the difference.