You bought a business, and the way it ran left with the person who sold it to you.

The plant, the stock, the staff and the name all transferred cleanly. What didn't transfer is the thing that actually made it work, which was one person's head. Who to ring. Who buys what and when. Which customer needs a call in March. Which supplier will do you a favour.

None of that was written down, because it never needed to be. It was one bloke and he knew.

So you're running a business whose operating system is missing, and the odd part is that everything looks fine from the outside. The trucks go out. The invoices go out. It just doesn't grow, and nobody can tell you exactly why.

Look at a business eighteen months after a handover and you'll usually find both owners still present online. Two Facebook pages, one of them last posted to in 2019. Two tracking pixels firing at once. Three different addresses across the directories because nobody updated the third one. An old logo on one truck and nothing at all on the other.

We looked at one where the business's own contact page spelled its own suburb wrong.

None of that is carelessness. It's what happens when nobody's job is to join the two eras up. But every one of those things quietly tells a customer the business isn't quite together, and they'll never say that out loud.

The list is usually the most valuable thing in the sale and the least likely to have been touched since. People don't stop buying because they found somebody better. They stop because nothing told them anything had changed, so they assumed the business they knew wasn't there any more.

One we looked at, a long standing customer had gone quiet and simply said he didn't know the new owners. He wasn't upset. Nobody had told him.

That's the cheapest revenue available to you and it's sitting in a spreadsheet somebody handed over on the last day.

This is what makes your situation different from most people we talk to. A tradie who needs leads needs them to survive. You've usually already spent the money: a bigger premises, stock on the floor, someone on deliveries, a second van.

Those are fixed costs. They cost the same whether you're at sixty per cent or ninety. So the value of another ten per cent of demand is almost entirely margin, which is a very different sum from the one a business does when it's deciding whether it can afford marketing.

It also means the honest question isn't "can I afford this", it's "what's the empty capacity costing me every month I don't fill it".

In front is everything that happens before anybody reaches you, and after a handover it's usually the messiest layer. Two of everything, an old name still ranking, reviews attached to a profile nobody controls.

The thing itself is the site, and the giveaway is almost always the footer. If the copyright predates the sale, that's the clearest possible signal that nobody's minding it.

Behind is where the enquiry goes and what happens to it. In an inherited business this is usually a person rather than a system, and often the person is the one who left.

It did, and that's not an argument for doing it his way. It's the reason you can't. He had twenty years of relationships and you have eighteen months.

What he had was a system, it just ran on memory. Yours has to run on something you can see, because you're not there every day and because the next person after you shouldn't inherit this same problem.

That's the whole job, really. Take what was in one head and put it somewhere the business can keep.

Then anything that needs your daily attention is going to fail, and we'd rather design around that than pretend otherwise.

Which means the answer isn't advice. Advice is a list of things for a person who doesn't have time to do them. The answer is the follow ups, the review requests and the reactivation running whether you look at them or not, and a place you can check in five minutes to see whether anything needs you.

The measure of whether it's working is that you think about it less than you do now.

Very common after a handover, because you inherited the arrangements as well as the assets, and nobody explained them.

Worth finding out three things about anything you're currently paying for. What exactly you get each month, in hours or deliverables rather than adjectives. Who owns the accounts, the domain and the ad data if you leave. And what it costs to stop.

We'll read whatever you're paying for and tell you what it actually is, including when the answer is that it's fine and you should keep it.

We publish a price for trades, because a trade build is the same shape almost every time and a number is more use to that person than a call is. Yours isn't the same shape twice. An inherited business might need the whole thing rebuilt or it might need the customer list woken up and two directory listings corrected, and those are not the same job or the same money.

So it gets scoped. What drives it is how much of the previous owner's setup has to be untangled and rebuilt in your name, how many places the business currently appears, and whether the site can be evolved or has to be replaced.

You'll get a number on the first call, not after three meetings and a proposal deck. And no lock in, no minimum term, and everything in your name from the start. That last part is worth more to you than to most people, because you've just been through a handover and you know exactly what it costs to be renting your own accounts from somebody else.

Every place the business appears online and whether those places agree with each other. What the previous owner set up in his own name that should be in yours. The customers who've gone quiet since the handover. Whether the capacity you've paid for is actually being filled. And what's worth doing first given how few hours you have to give it.

That last one is the real deliverable. Not a list of everything wrong, an order of operations.

If you bought the business to sit on it and sell it again, this is the wrong spend.

If the previous owner is still there and still running it his way, wait. Two systems is worse than one, even when one of them is only in somebody's head.

And if the business is genuinely at capacity, don't fill the funnel. Fix the constraint first and come back to us when growing is the problem again.