The five moves every business runs on.

The five moves, and where each one loses you money

• 1 · Lead in. Someone finds you and reaches out. Where you lose the job: calls and messages that never get answered, especially after hours. Answering first is what gets you into the conversation at all.
• 2 · Respond and quote. You get back to them with a real answer and a price. Where you lose the job: slow replies. In the lead-response research below, the odds of qualifying a lead collapse within the first hour.
• 3 · Do the job. The actual work. Where you lose the day: manual scheduling, double entry, and dropped follow-ups that let jobs slip.
• 4 · Get paid. The invoice goes out and gets paid. Where you lose the cash: invoices sent late and chased by hand, so money you already earned sits for weeks.
• 5 · Repeat and refer. One finished job becomes the next review, rebooking, and referral. Where you lose the next job: no system at all, so every job starts from a cold stranger.

What the research says about speed

The best-documented loss is the response gap. James Oldroyd's 2011 Harvard Business Review piece audited how fast companies responded to web-generated leads. The average response took over 40 hours.

Firms that reached a lead within an hour were about seven times likelier to qualify it than firms that waited even one hour more. The famous five-minute finding comes from the earlier Lead Response Management study (Oldroyd with InsideSales.com; the page does not date itself): contact attempts within five minutes performed dramatically better than attempts at thirty minutes.

The numbers are from B2B lead audits, so treat them as directional for your trade, but the direction is not subtle.

How to read your own business with this

Walk one real customer through your five moves, from the first ring to the referral, and write down where they waited on you. Each wait is a lost job with a price on it: missed calls times your close rate times your average job. We do this mapping live on a call, and the map is yours whether you hire us or not. The point of the exercise is that the fix is almost never "work harder inside a move." It is wiring the handoffs so nothing waits on a human who is on a roof.