Write down your day-zero numbers before you hire anyone

The week before you hire someone is the only clean week you get

Right now your business is running with nobody new in it. Every number you can measure today belongs to you alone. From the day someone starts, every number has two possible explanations, and you will never be able to separate them again.

That isn’t suspicion. It’s arithmetic. “Enquiries are up” means nothing if nobody wrote down what they were before. Neither does “enquiries are flat”, which is the sentence that keeps a bad arrangement alive for a year.

So spend an hour on a file. Plain text, a Word doc, the notes app on your phone. The format doesn’t matter. The date at the top does.

The 10 things that go in it

For every one of these, write the number and where the number came from. The source is half the value.

1. The date, and who wrote it. Top of the file, before anything else.
2. Every phone number a customer could ring you on, and where each one lands. The mobile, the number on the ute, the number on the website, the number on your Google profile, and the one on that directory you signed up to in 2019. List them even when they’re the same, because writing them out is how you find out they’re not.
3. How many calls you took last month. From the phone bill, the call log on the handset, or memory. Write which of the three it was, next to the number.
4. Jobs booked last month, and the average invoice. Out of your accounting software, exported on a stated date. Not a feel.
5. Where your last 10 jobs came from. One line each: repeat customer, referral off a mate, Google, the lead platform, a sign on a fence. Put the word “guess” next to any you’re not sure of.
6. Your Google review count and star average, and the day you looked. Both move. Neither means anything without the date.
7. Your Google Business Profile as it currently stands. Primary category, any secondary categories, whether it’s a service area or a shopfront, and the suburb list exactly as entered.
8. The pages your website actually has today, listed by URL. Then send a test enquiry through your own contact form, and write down whether it arrived and how long it took. If it didn’t arrive, you’ve found your first job.
9. What you’re paying now, and to whom. Every monthly line: the agency, the leads platform, the directory subscriptions, the hosting, the domain. Total it. That total is the number the next 12 months gets judged against.
10. What you want in 12 months, in your own words, with a number in it. “More work” is not a number. “Two more blokes on the tools and off the ladder myself by Christmas” is.

An hour, most of it item 9.

Where your figure and their estimate disagree, both go in

Whoever you hire will produce their own version of some of these. Their count of your enquiries. Their read on where your work comes from. Their estimate of what your patch is worth.

Where their number and yours differ, both go in the file, side by side, with names on them. Yours labelled as yours. Theirs labelled as theirs. Not averaged, and theirs does not win by default for being a professional’s.

The gap is the useful part. If you’re certain you take 40 calls a month and the person auditing you can only find 12, one of you is wrong about what counts as a call. Finding that out on day zero is a five-minute conversation. Finding it out in month 6 is an argument about an invoice.

Mark it PARTIAL if it’s partial

The pull towards a finished-looking document is strong. Resist it. Where you have no dated source for a line, write “no source” on that line, and put the word PARTIAL at the top of the file.

A baseline marked PARTIAL is still worth keeping: it tells you which parts had nothing dated behind them. It stays marked that way.

A baseline that says plainly where it could not see beats a tidy one with estimates quietly filling the gaps. Six months later you cannot tell a guess from a measurement unless somebody labelled it on the day, and by then the person who could have told you is you, and you’ve forgotten.

Now the rule that makes the whole thing worth doing

Once it’s written and agreed, you never edit it. Not corrected. Not tidied. Not updated. Ever.

That sounds precious right up until the first time you want to change one, so here it is with a number in it.

Say in March you write down 42 calls last month, from memory, because the bill wasn’t handy. In June the phone bill surfaces and the real figure was 31. Every instinct says open the file and fix the 42.

Fix it, and three things happen. The March file now says 31, and nothing anywhere records that it ever said 42. Anyone reading the folder in December, you included, sees a number that has always been that number. Second, any figure worked out against 42 in the meantime is now floating with nothing under it. Third, and worst, you have lost the record of what you actually believed on day zero, which was the entire point of writing it.

There’s a fourth, and it’s the one that matters when money is involved. A file that can be edited can be edited toward whoever is arguing. Nobody has to be dishonest for that to happen. Everybody nudges numbers toward the story they’re currently telling, and an editable baseline quietly allows it.

A correction is a second file, not an edit

So what do you do with the 31? You write a second file. New date in the filename, sitting next to the first one. Both stay. Neither replaces the other.

The correction needs four lines:

• What this corrects: calls taken, February, from the file dated 4 March.
• Was: 42. Source: memory, written 4 March.
• Is: 31. Source: phone bill, exported 11 June.
• Nothing else in the 4 March file changes.

Name the files so the folder sorts itself: day-zero-2026-03-04 and day-zero-correction-2026-06-11. The date in the filename means nobody has to open anything to see what came first. That small habit does more work than it looks like it should.

Your folder now tells the truth twice. What you believed on 4 March, and what you found out on 11 June. The second one is frequently the more useful fact, because “we were 11 calls out on our own numbers” tells you something about how the business measures itself that the corrected figure alone never would.

What to do with it 90 days later

Print the day-zero file. Put it beside whatever your marketer sends you in month 3. Go line by line. Which of the 10 items has moved, which hasn’t, and which one has nobody looked at since you wrote it down.

That comparison is the only reason the file exists. So ask whoever you’re about to hire: will you write the starting numbers down with me before you begin? A baseline written on day zero is the single document that can make month 6 awkward for the person you just hired, which is a decent argument for writing it yourself, this week, before you hire anybody at all.

One caution about what it can and can’t settle. It won’t tell you where you rank or how many leads a month should produce, and neither will anything else honest. Nothing we run measures those. In our retainer wording, nothing gets judged on traffic for at least the first month, in writing rather than in somebody’s head. What the file settles is narrower and more useful: what was true on the day, and who said so.

Once you’ve got it, you can finally do something with the paperwork that turns up each month. Five questions is where to start.