Hello and welcome back. Episode twelve, and a title Mon is rightly proud of inventing herself: the lost leads of the boom. Since COVID we have all lived through an absolute boom where demand was so high that, frankly, you could be pretty average at business and still succeed. If you have tried to get a trade in Perth lately, you know the feeling. You did not really get quotes, you got whoever could show up. As conditions tighten, a lot of business owners are starting to notice a gap where those easy wins used to be.

What we mean by lost leads

When work is easy to win, follow up gets lazy. Proposals closed before you even made the call. The plumber you did not chase because you had no second van free, or because you quietly knew that particular customer would be a pain. In a boom, none of that mattered, because the pipeline was full anyway.

Now those leads have gone three ways. Some stopped spending altogether and parked the renovation or the upgrade. Some are simply waiting it out. And the sad ones went somewhere else. The reason it stings now is the economy. We are heading into a period where, depending on how the fuel and oil situation plays out, we could see anything from a slight blip with expensive fuel through to several tough quarters. Mel lived through the last financial crisis embedded in business and remembers it being slow going right through to about 2015, a long grind of six years where sales were genuinely hard. A handful of warm contacts is worth a great deal when it gets like that.

This is not about spending money on software

The fix people reach for is a CRM, and we are advocates for that long term. But Mel is clear this is really about systemisation, not spending. “I don’t give a crap if it’s a spreadsheet,” is roughly how she put it, as long as you are actually recording who enquired, when, and what they wanted.

One of our favourite examples is a client who keeps a physical black book of every quote and every name he has ever sent. He is proud of it, and rightly so, because he can flick back three or four months and call someone with, “I gave you this quote, you weren’t quite ready at the time.” That is a working system. Most businesses spent the boom letting people disappear instead.

Where to find the leads you think you lost

If you never kept a tidy record, not all hope is lost. Your email is a goldmine. Search the terms you always use when you quote, words like proposal or managed services, and you will surface a list of people to reconsider. For clients running a lead sheet, the entries marked red because the timing or the budget was not right are worth a fresh look. That small job you turned down when the workshop was full, or the CNC machines were booked out, might be perfectly welcome now.

Your accounting system is another rich source. Pull the customers who bought from you in FY23, 24 and 25 but did not in FY26, and ask why. Often, you will find dozens, even hundreds, of steady customers who quietly stopped, not because they were unhappy, but because you were busy servicing a bigger fish and never noticed they drifted.

The nurture itself can be simple. Mel held a contact at the Perth Convention and Exhibition Centre, now an eight-year client, through a roughly twenty-four-month courtship of a useful note every three months. The best companies never stop doing that quiet, genuine nurture, and now they get to tap into it.

Why this episode is worth a listen

Mel and Mon walk through exactly how to rebuild a lead list from scratch using tools you already own, how to write the kind of “checking in” message that does not reek of desperation, and even how to reopen a conversation with a customer who left by simply asking for honest feedback as the owner. There is a great segment on the difference between chasing work in a boom versus a downturn, and why the next two years belong to whoever owns their data rather than whoever shouts loudest. If your follow-up went soft over the last few years, this is the episode to fix it.

In the next twelve to twenty-four months, it will not be about who shouts the loudest. It will be about who owns their data and actually does something with it. Get organised now, capture every enquiry into whatever system you will actually use, and prepare yourself for what you did not do when times were great. That is how you raise the bar before the next boom ends.

Got a burning question you want the answer to? Stuck on some marketing jargon? Unsure how AI fits into the future of your business? Just want a straight answer to a question no one’s ever explained properly? Send it our way. We’ll pick the best ones to unpack in future episodes.