THE PROFIT LEAK ANALYSIS, THE FIRST STEP INTO PROFITABILITY
I will find $35,000 in your business, or you pay nothing.
The Profit Leak Analysis is a fixed-price diagnostic of where your tourism business is losing money. If I do not identify at least $35,000 in profit uplift, you pay nothing for the analysis.
In writing. I have never had to refund one.
Thirty minutes, free, no pitch.
in profit uplift identified, or you pay nothing
weeks, give or take
interviews
written report
The Profit Leak Analysis takes about three weeks. I go through your numbers, your pricing, your product margins and your channel costs, I talk to three of your customers and three of your suppliers myself, and you get a written report telling you where the money is going and what to do about it in what order.
WHERE THIS COMES FROM
The week after I took over Aquaduck Gold Coast in July 2018, I put the ticket price up by two dollars. Thirty-six to thirty-eight.
Nobody complained. Nobody rang up. Nobody cancelled.
We carried 82,000 passengers a year. So that two dollar decision, made in my first week, was worth $164,000 a year, and nothing about what it cost us to run that boat changed.
I have to be honest about one part of it. The OTAs took their slice of the extra two dollars on the bookings that came through them, so not all of that landed in my account. It was still the easiest money I made that year, and it took about ten minutes to decide.
That is not a clever trick. That is just what happens when nobody has looked at a price in a while.
By the time I sold that business, net profit per passenger was up 200 percent. Not because of one price rise. Because of a lot of small decisions like that one, found by going through the business line by line and asking what each thing actually costs and what it actually earns.
Most operators have never done that. Not because they are lazy. Because they are flat out running the thing, and there is no natural moment in a season where you sit down and cost out a guest.
That is the whole job of this analysis.
ticket rise, $36 to $38
passengers a year
a year, same boat,
same costs
Before OTA commission on platform bookings. The 200 percent lift in net profit per passenger came over the whole four and a half years, not from this one decision.
What the guarantee actually means
I want to be straight with you about this, because a guarantee like that gets used badly by a lot of people.
I am guaranteeing that I will identify at least $35,000 in profit uplift. That is money sitting in your business that you are not currently keeping. It is not banked the day you read the report. You still have to go and do the things.
What I am putting on the line is my judgement. If I go through your business and cannot find $35,000 in it, then I was wrong about you being a fit, and you should not be paying me for that.
I have never had to refund one. But the offer is real, it is in writing, and you keep the report the either way.
SIX THINGS, IN ORDER
What I actually look at
Your product margin, one product at a time.
This is the one that surprises people. Not all products are profitable. Your most popular experience is very often your least profitable, and you will not see it from the top line because volume hides it.
Your cost to serve.
What it genuinely costs to put one guest through one experience, including the parts nobody counts.
Your pricing and your yield.
When you last moved, what the market will carry, what your peak and shoulder structure should look like, and where you are leaving money on the table on the days you are already full.
Your channel costs, in dollars rather than percentages.
Everyone knows the OTAs take 20 to 30 percent. Almost nobody has worked out what that adds up to across a year, or which channels are quietly costing more than they return once you count the admin. You need a market mix, and you cannot build one without knowing what each channel really costs.
Your direct booking gap, sized.
How much of your volume should be coming through your own channel, what it is now, and what the difference is worth to you in a year.
Where you sit in search, including AI search.
What a traveller finds when they look for what you sell, in Google and in the tools people now ask instead of Google.
SIX CONVERSATIONS
The part nobody else does
I interview three of your customers and three of your suppliers. Personally, not a survey.
Your customers will tell me things they will never tell you, because you are the owner and they are being polite. Why they picked you. What they nearly booked instead. What they would have paid. Whether they would come back and what would have to change.
Your suppliers will tell me what your business is like to deal with, where your terms are worse than they need to be, and what your competitors are negotiating.
Six conversations. It is the difference between a report about your numbers and a report about your business.
Why they picked you, what they nearly booked instead, what they would have paid.
What you are like to deal with, where your terms could be better.
What you get
A written report, not a spreadsheet and not a deck.
It applies my ProfiTune Business Analysis methodology to your actual numbers, and it comes back with the leaks named, sized in dollars, and put in order. Every recommendation has a cost against it and an expected return, so you can see which three things to do first and which four can wait until winter.
You own it. If you take that report and go and do the work yourself, that is a good outcome and it happens.
HOW LONG IT TAKES, AND WHAT YOU HAVE TO DO
How the three weeks run
About three weeks from the day I have your numbers. Your part is roughly two hours.
The Growth Gap Call
Thirty minutes to check this is the right thing for your business right now.
One call and your numbers
A call to get the lay of the land, then access to your booking platform data, your last two years of financials and your channel reports.
I do the digging
The numbers, the pricing, the product margins, and the six interviews with your customers and suppliers.
Your report
The leaks named, sized in dollars and put in order, each with a cost and an expected return.
If your books are a mess, that is normal and it is often where the leak is hiding. You do not need to tidy anything up for me.
WHAT OPERATORS SAY
When Sarah goes through a business
"Recently, I requested Sarah to review my business setup, looking at new opportunities and activities and through that I have gained such valuable insights that I would not have been aware of without her help. Luckily for me, Sarah is always offering help on business issues whilst maintaining layman's terms in order for me to understand. Her integrity is profound and I know her to be reliable in looking at my business problems with a deepened understanding of what works and what could be implemented."
"You can almost see the cogs moving in Sarah's mind as she absorbs details of conversations about business plans, issues and strategies, dissects them and offers solutions and suggestions based on her business skills and knowledge."
Who this is for
Operators turning over somewhere between $500,000 and $20 million who are busy and cannot work out where the money goes. Bookings are healthy. The season looked strong. And there is nothing much in the bank at the end of it.
If that is you, you do not have a marketing problem, and more bookings will not fix it. Adding volume to a business with a margin problem makes the problem arrive faster.
Who this is not for
If you are running well below capacity, do this later. Pricing work on empty seats does not do much. Fix discovery and bookings first, then come back to me.
If you are in your first year, you do not have enough history for the analysis to say anything useful yet.
If you are not going to act on it, do not buy it. A report that sits in a drawer is an expensive way to feel productive, and I would rather tell you that now than take the money.
Growth Gap Call
Thirty minutes. Which rung you are on.
Profit Leak Analysis
About three weeks. You can stop here and do the work yourself.
Profitability coaching
Fortnightly, one to one. Starts with your report.
Why this exists
Every operator I coach through Profitability does this first. No exceptions, and I get asked about that a lot.
I cannot coach you on decisions I have not seen the numbers behind, and you cannot judge whether the coaching is worth it until you have seen what is actually wrong. Six months of sessions built on a guess helps nobody.
So the analysis comes first, and plenty of operators stop there. That is a legitimate ending and it is not a failure of the process.
What this is not
It is not an audit and it is not your accountant's job. Your accountant tells you what happened. This tells you what to change.
It is not a valuation, though what it finds tends to move one.
It is not a template with your name typed into it. I do not have a version of this I can run without talking to your customers.
And it is not a marketing review. If your problem turns out to be that nobody can find you, I will tell you that and point you at the right work instead.
Investment is discussed on the Growth Gap Call.
You do not need to guess at any of this.
The numbers tell the story. They are already sitting in your booking platform and your accounting software, and they will tell you exactly which products are carrying the business and which ones are being carried. Somebody just has to go and look.
So, what are your numbers telling you about your business?
Book a Growth Gap Call with me. Thirty minutes, no pitch, and I will tell you honestly whether this is the right thing for you to be spending money on right now.
Let's build a business that you love and that loves you.
Thirty minutes. No pitch.
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It is ten times what the analysis costs, and we go through that number on the Growth Gap Call. I set it at ten times because a diagnostic that finds twice its own cost is not worth your time or mine.
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Then you pay nothing for the analysis. You keep the report either way, because you will have paid for it in time and access and you should have something for that.
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No, and I would not trust anyone who told you it was. It is uplift identified, sized in dollars, with the action attached. Whether it lands in your account depends on you doing the work. I will tell you which parts are quick and which parts are hard.
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About three weeks from when I have your numbers. Around two hours of your time in total.
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Most are. You do not need to tidy anything before we start, and the mess is often where the leak is. I would rather see it as it really is.
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Yes, three of them, and three suppliers, with your permission and your introduction. It is thirty minutes each and it is the most useful part of the process.
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Probably, in some places, and probably not everywhere. Raising prices across the board is what people do when they have not looked properly. The point of this is knowing which prices, by how much, and on which days.
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That is up to you. Plenty of operators take it and do the work themselves, in the order it sets out. If you want help doing it, Profitability coaching starts with the two of us walking through your report and setting three goals from it.
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No. The analysis stands on its own. If you do want the coaching, this is the required first step, so you have not wasted anything either way.
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Yes. Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Ireland, the US and Canada. Everything is delivered remotely and anything quoted is billed in your own currency.
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Investment is discussed on the Growth Gap Call.