How to use the CRM, ordered by what you are trying to do rather than by which screen does it.
One card, opened the same way from every screen — Today, Pipeline, the event boards, the Web inbox and Lead lookup. Whatever you change in it is visible everywhere else immediately.
Company, score out of twelve, RAG band, the criteria as coloured bullets, and the Angle — the likely constraint on the owner, phrased as an opening. Beneath it:
Everything else starts closed, so the card opens the same size each time: Stage & farming, Notes, Company details, Directors, Score breakdown, Mini Q, Event history.
Company details and Directors are read-only until you press Edit details or Edit directors. Make the change, press Save changes, and a confirmation lists exactly what is about to change before anything is written. Cancel leaves the record as it was.
Five screens on the bar. Each answers a different question, and nothing is in two places.
| Screen | Answers | How often |
|---|---|---|
| Today | What needs doing right now — diary dates, follow-ups due, what you last touched | Every morning |
| Pipeline | Who is worth working — the rework pools and the pool you are building | Daily |
| Events | How is this morning going — the two boards, the roll-up and the ticket run | When an event is live |
| KPIs | How is the build going — morning by morning, and the last twelve weeks | Weekly |
| Find & Enrich | Finding new businesses and scoring them | In bursts, when the pool runs low |
Everything else sits under Advanced — Route Planner, Lead lookup, Outreach, Web Inbox, QR Codes, Videos, Event Report and Backup & Export. The Guides menu holds this guide and its four companions.
Events are temporary. The Pipeline is permanent.
A lead passes through an event and comes out with an outcome. The board closes once the morning is over; the lead carries on in the Pipeline. That is why a business that declined in July is in front of you in September, with the reason it gave.
Open the CRM and you land on Today. It is built to be read top to bottom.
Drawn from the Step 6, Main Q and Diagnostic dates set on event cards:
If the diary is empty, the day's work is in the Pipeline — qualifying, visiting, and building toward the next morning.
This is the work that happens between events, and it is most of the work.
Find & Enrich → Find businesses. Pick locations, optionally a postcode district, one or more trades, and search — or sweep everything within a radius of a postcode or estate name. Limited companies only is ticked by default, and businesses already held are hidden and counted, so a repeat sweep shows only what is new.
Tick what you want and import. Phone numbers from Google are labelled unconfirmed — treat them as a starting point.
Find & Enrich → Enrich & score. Each lead is looked up on Companies House for SIC codes, directors, ages and appointment dates; Claude estimates the turnover band and headcount and describes the business; the score is calculated from those facts. Fifty leads is one click. Refresh from CH only does the Companies House half without the AI call.
Turnover is estimated into six bands: Under £100k · £100k–£200k · £200k–£2m · £2m–£7m · £7m–£15m · Over £15m. A lead still carrying the old single £2m–£15m band shows it with a prompt to choose one of the two new halves.
Anything that cannot be scored is listed with the reason — almost always no Companies House match, where the trading name differs from the registered one. Correct the name or company number on the card and enrich again.
Scored leads land in Pipeline under Ready to invite, best first, and wait there until a morning is booked. Building the pool early wastes nothing.
The score is calculated, not guessed. Claude supplies estimates of fact; the rubric turns those into a number. The same lead always produces the same score, and every point is explained on the card.
| Criterion | Points | What earns them |
|---|---|---|
| Turnover band | 0–3 | £200k–£2m scores 3 · £2m–£7m and £7m–£15m score 2 · £100k–£200k scores 1 · under £100k and over £15m score 0 |
| Director count | 0–2 | One or two directors scores 2. Three or four scores 1. Five or more scores 0 |
| Owner tenure | 0–2 | Longest-serving director: five years or more scores 2, two to five scores 1 |
| Drive time | 0–2 | Under an hour from BD20 scores 2, one to one and a half hours scores 1 |
| Trade fit | 0–2 | Manufacturing, construction, haulage, wholesale, engineering, motor trade |
| Director age | 0–1 | 28 to 55 scores 1 — the active owner-operator window |
| Size | −3 | Taken off once if the turnover band is £7m–£15m or over £15m, or enrichment estimates 50 or more staff |
Twelve points available. Companies House verification is a gate: unverified means no score at all rather than a low one.
| Band | Score | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Green | 8–12 | Core profile. Invite to the next morning. |
| Amber | 4–7 | Partial fit. Worth a call to find out what is missing. |
| Red | 0–3 | Outside profile. Park unless something changes. |
| Unverified | — | Not on Companies House. No score possible. |
A cap limits the band whatever the total, and the card says which one fired and why.
| Condition | Caps at | Reason |
|---|---|---|
| Beyond 90 minutes of BD20 | Red | Outside visitable range |
| Turnover above £15m | Red | Buying decisions become corporate |
| Over £7m, by band or 50+ staff | Amber | Generally too large for the practice |
| Five or more directors | Amber | The person who can say yes may not be in the room |
| Outside target trades | Amber | Consumer and retail do not fit the proposition |
| Director based outside range | Amber | The business is reachable but the owner may not travel |
| Two or more amber caps | Red | Missing on more than one axis |
Over £7m never reaches Ready to invite, whatever its colour. It sits in Low fit with the reason in gold, where it can still be found and farmed by hand if there is a good reason to.
Three tabs. Working pools groups leads by what they need. All leads is search and lookup — it matches company, postcode, address, director and known-as name. Calling rounds is the visiting operation.
Every pool opens closed, showing only its name and count. Open the one you are working; the others stay out of the way.
Already committed shows who is on a future morning, so nobody is invited twice. A lead marked Do not invite is in no pool at all; it is still found by All leads and Lead lookup, and only changing its stage on purpose brings it back.
Tick across any pools — the selection carries between them — then choose from the bar:
Tick the leads you want to visit and choose Build calling round. Name it, give a start postcode and calls per day; the leads are ordered into a driving route and split into days. Print route gives the day-by-day schedule with a Google Maps link per day.
Work the round on its board: To visit → Interested → Gatekeeper → Not now → Declined → Invite. Not now sets a six-month follow-up; Declined records it; Interested and Invite are ready for a morning.
Leads you want kept ready but are not inviting yet. Set it on the card under Stage & farming or with the bulk button. Adding the lead to an event, or moving it to follow-up or NFA, clears the flag.
Park removes a lead from the working lists without deleting it, so the Maps scraper still recognises the business and will not offer it again. Delete permanently removes it — and it will reappear on the next search. Park is almost always what you want.
The invitation is a printed card from a roll of two thousand. Each carries a unique
six-character number, printed CXZ M7D, and a QR code that opens the invitation on
the website. The number on the card is the only identifier from card to client —
it is the ticket reference and the booking reference.
The card goes into the owner's hand first; the number goes into the CRM straight after. Open the lead card and type the number into Card handed over?, then Record. The CRM never offers a number of its own — only the one on the card in their hand can be right.
Card lost, or the owner re-invited for another morning? Press + card and record the new number. The newest card is the one in their hand, so it becomes the ticket reference; earlier cards show struck through, and everything done on either card is counted as one invitation. Clicking any card number offers to clear it — that only unties the number from this business so it can go against the right one.
| Mark | Means |
|---|---|
| Sent | The date the first card for this morning was recorded |
| Opened | They scanned or typed the code — with the number of opens |
| Outcome | They confirmed, declined or asked a question on the website |
| Mini Q | Answered, by phone with Karen or on the website |
| Ticket | They confirmed their posted ticket on the website |
| Attended | Marked attended on the morning |
The strip is observation, not judgement: it shows what the website saw, live, and changes nothing on its own.
Advanced → Web Inbox. Everything the website captures lands here — opened invitation, confirmed a place, completed Mini Q, asked a question, declined, ticket confirmed, and requests for an invitation. Nothing reaches a lead until someone decides it should.
| Button | Does |
|---|---|
| Update lead # | The code is on a card we recorded: the answer is written to that lead. A confirmation registers them on the morning they chose; a decline records the reason; a Mini Q fills the Mini Q and the question for the morning |
| Create lead | No card behind it — an enquiry. A new lead is made for you to qualify |
| Dismiss | Marks it dealt with and leaves the lead alone. It still counts in the card strip and the figures |
| Delete | Removes that one entry entirely. Use it for tests and mistakes — it asks first and names the entry |
The CRM sends nothing when someone confirms. The website has already sent the owner their confirmation; never send a second one.
Events → open the event. Two boards, one above the other, with the This morning roll-up above them: cards out, opened, outcome chosen, confirmed, Mini Q, ticket confirmed and attended, counted by business.
Declined sits alongside. Choosing it asks for a reason from a fixed list — the reason is what makes the lead workable again, so it is not optional.
Karen's call after someone registers, or the owner's own answers on the website. Editable only at Registered; after that it is a locked record of what they said at the time.
Open each lead and mark Attended or No Show, which moves them to the post-event board. The buttons appear on any lead still on the pre-event board, so someone who turns up without a ticket can still be recorded. Reception and speaker lists are Advanced → Event Report.
All three diary dates — Step 6, Main Q due back, Diagnostic — are on every card at once, so the sequence can be booked during one call. Those dates populate Today.
Registered, attended, Step 6 and client are stamped when a lead first reaches them. A guest who moves on to Step 6 or Diag Booked still counts as attended, so a morning's figures do not fall as its guests progress. Moving a lead back down clears the stamp.
Archive the event when it is over. An archived event can be deleted from the archived list — only ever an archived one — which is for test events and mistakes, not real mornings.
The ticket is a bulk-printed shell — identical blanks. Laser once, pen twice. Four fields are the same on every ticket for a morning — Date, Time, Where, Postcode — and go on in one laser pass. Two vary per person — Reference and Guest — and are written by hand.
Open the event and press Ticket run. ← Back to the event at the top returns you. The page shows:
Print the alignment proof on one spoiled shell, A6 landscape, at Actual size / 100% — never Fit to page.
Measure the bar near the bottom. It must be 70 mm. Shorter means the printer is shrinking the page, which also closes up the gaps between the lines; fix the print setting — no button cures it.
On the Reference row, read where the card's own line crosses the two small scales — say DOWN 1 and RIGHT 0.5. Press those buttons by those amounts and print the proof again. Stop when it reads 0 on both.
Print 2. Overlay onto the shells, one at a time, at Actual size. Write Reference and Guest from the write list.
The move is a setting of the printer, not of the card, so once it is right it stays right until the printer changes.
For someone registered by phone, open their card and press Print ticket — a complete ticket on plain paper, in the same design, with their reference and the event details. It never goes onto a shell.
Freeze the list, print and post first class the same day, five working days before. The −3 day reminder call is the safety net for a ticket that has not arrived. No event name, no companion name (the stub says Admits Two), no QR code, no price, no second reference.
The people who did not attend registered, completed a Mini Q and told you their biggest challenge. You know more about them than about any cold prospect.
Mark them No Show and record why when it comes through.
"Sorry we missed you, here is what you missed." Reference their actual challenge from the Mini Q.
Re-book onto the next morning · Follow up in 6 months · NFA if they are genuinely done.
The KPIs screen shows how the build is going. It only reads; nothing on it changes a record. Every figure comes from the same place as the screen it summarises, so the two always agree.
| Stage | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Prospect | On the event, not yet contacted |
| To Register | Being called or visited |
| Registered | Confirmed attending — by phone, visit or the website |
| Min Q Completed | Mini Q answered |
| Declined | Said no — reason recorded |
| Postcard Sent · Letter & Ticket · E Ticket Sent | The physical and digital touches before the day |
| Attended / No Show | Outcome on the day |
| Step 6 Booked / Done | The follow-up conversation |
| Main Q Due | Full questionnaire outstanding |
| Diag Booked | Diagnostic appointment set |
| Client / Ex-Client | Converted, or engagement ended |
| NFA | Do not invite — in no pool, cannot be added to an event |
| Follow-up 6mth | Parked with a due date six months out |
Holiday · Too busy / short staffed / appointment · Did not say was coming · Further information · Another part of country · Not involved day to day · Timing wrong — try next event · Remove from marketing. From the website, do not invite me again is recorded as Do not invite again and marks the lead NFA.
Advanced → Backup & Export. Download the database after every field session and keep a dated copy. Weekly, also take the CSV exports. Always take a backup before any change to the system.
The Business Fix CRM · User Guide v8.0 · November 2026