Business Data · Jamestown, TN
Data analysis for small businesses
Most small businesses are sitting on the answers already. Three years of job tickets. A till that has rung up every sale since you opened. A customer list nobody has time to read. A stock spreadsheet from 2023. Somewhere in those records is which work makes money, where you are winning, and what is quietly costing you. We get it out, in plain English, and change it.
What This Actually Is
Four things, no jargon
Your records already hold the answers
Job tickets, invoices, till receipts, a customer list, an appointment book, a spreadsheet of stock. Every question worth asking about your business is already answered in there somewhere. Nobody has had a spare week to add it up.
That adding-up is the job.
The work is translation, not software
A stack of numbers is worth nothing. Knowing that 240 of your customers live in one town and 88 live in the next one is a decision — about where to advertise, who to call, what to charge.
Plain English out, decision made, change done.
You do not need big data
A business with 600 invoices has plenty to work with. Small records answer big questions, as long as the right few columns are in them. Nobody needs a data warehouse to find out which jobs lose money.
Three useful columns beat a system you never open.
We answer the question, then change the thing
Most advice stops at a report. The point is the price that gets corrected, the far calls that get moved to one day, the stock that stops being ordered, the page that gets rebuilt.
You pay for an answer and a fix, not a dashboard.
The Questions Worth Answering
What your own records can tell you
These are the questions we get asked most in this part of Tennessee, and every one of them is answerable from records the business already has.
Which jobs or calls actually make money?
Cost every one properly: hours on site, parts at what you paid, drive time both ways, and the free return visit three weeks later. In most trades nobody has ever added the driving in.
What we do: price every job in your history and name the ones that lose money.
Where am I winning, and where am I invisible?
Count your customers town by town from the addresses you already have, and sit that against the households in each town. Twenty-eight percent in your home town and eight percent one town over are two completely different businesses.
What we do: build the town-by-town picture and point the next advertising dollar at the gap.
Which customers are worth keeping?
Who came once and never returned, who is worth ten times the average, and who is drifting away right now before they tell you.
What we do: read the list, then give you who to call this month and why.
Which of my prices lose money?
Most small businesses carry three or four jobs or products that quietly cost them money, and have no idea which ones they are.
What we do: find them in your own history and price the change before you make it.
What should I stop buying or stocking?
What never moves, what always runs out, and what you buy in the wrong quantity because that is how it has always been ordered.
What we do: read purchases against sales and give you a stop list and a stock-deeper list.
Do I need another hand, or just a better-shaped week?
Whether the problem is capacity, or one brutal day and one easy one. The second van is expensive; a rearranged week is free.
What we do: measure hours against jobs, then show what new capacity would have to earn.
What does the calendar do to my cash?
The months that carry the year, the months that drain it, and the ones you should be advertising in instead of the ones you do.
What we do: lay your history out by month and area and build next season's plan on it.
Why don't more people call me?
Sometimes the answer is in the records, not the website: nobody knows you exist in the next town, the phone number is missing from everything, or the last forty people who looked you up found nothing to look at.
What we do: find which of those it is before spending a penny on advertising.
Worked Example
“I have three years of job tickets and I don't know which calls made money”
A plumbing and HVAC outfit — the same story as most trades around here. Hundreds of invoices, a diary, a mileage log if the owner is organised, and three years of instinct. Two answerable questions fall straight out of that pile.
Question 1 — where am I actually winning?
Count the different customer addresses in each town from your own job history, then divide by the households in that town. Real household counts for this area (2020 census and the latest American Community Survey): Jamestown has 856 households; Fentress County has 7,443 occupied households out of 9,184 housing units, so roughly 1,700 sit empty.
| What the job history says | Households | Penetration |
|---|---|---|
| 240 different customers in Jamestown | 856 | 28% |
| 88 different customers in a town 20 minutes away | 1,100 | 8% |
| 390 customers across the whole county | 7,443 | 5% |
Read it like a business. At 28% in your home town you are nearly worked out: growth there means repeat work, referrals and better pricing, not more advertising. At 8% twenty minutes away, either nobody serves that town properly or the one who does has a bad name — and that is where the next advertising dollar belongs.
One honest caveat: households are not customers. Rentals, do-it-yourselfers and people who already have a man mean the percentages are never exact. Use them to compare towns against each other, which is what the decision needs.
Question 2 — which calls made money, and why is the day disappearing?
Cost every call properly:
- Hours on site × what an hour of your time is actually worth.
- Parts and materials at what you paid, not what you charged.
- Drive time both ways — the cost almost nobody counts.
- The callback you had to make for free three weeks later.
Worked with round numbers so you can swap in yours: 612 calls a year is about 12 a week. If the average call is 25 minutes each way, that is 50 minutes in the truck per call — roughly 500 hours a year, or sixty working days, spent driving between jobs rather than doing them. Cut the driving by a fifth with two changes and you get about a hundred hours back. At your own hourly rate, that is the size of the prize.
The two changes that usually do it:
- Book the next job in the same direction, not the next free slot. Two calls on one side of the county beat two calls on opposite sides, even if one waits an extra day.
- Price the far calls properly, or move them to a set day. A minimum charge for out-of-area work is not rude, it is the difference between a profitable call and a favour.
The numbers to watch afterwards: calls per day, billable hours against hours paid, revenue per hour of driving by town, and callback rate by job type. The last one is where trades quietly lose their best month.
Consultants quote 10–20% reductions in drive time from better scheduling. Treat that as the ceiling of what is available, not a promise — only your own before and after figures are worth trusting.
The same pile of tickets answers the neighbours of those questions: whether the second van pays for itself, which service to stop offering, and whether the town you are barely in is worth a day a week.
What You Already Have
The records, and what each one answers
You do not need to collect anything new to start. These are the six sources we work from most, and the question each one settles.
| Record you already keep | What it answers |
|---|---|
| Invoices and job tickets | What each job earned after drive time, parts and callbacks; which job types to quote differently. |
| Till receipts or a POS export | What sells together, what never moves, which hours need a second person. |
| A customer list or CRM | Who is worth keeping, who has stopped coming, who to call this month. |
| An appointment book or diary | No-shows, rebooking rates, which services and staff are worth the time they take. |
| Purchase orders and a stock list | What to stop carrying, what to stock deeper, how much cash is asleep on the shelf. |
| Your website and Google listing | How many people found you, what they typed, what they read, whether Google can see you at all. |
Any Business, Not Just Trades
Same method, different records
| Business | What they have | What it answers |
|---|---|---|
| A shop or convenience store | Two years of till receipts | which products sell together, which never move, and which hours are busy enough to need a second person. |
| A restaurant or diner | Tickets by item and hour | which dishes make money after food cost, what to take off the menu, and which shifts are over-staffed. |
| A builder or contractor | Quotes and completed jobs | what fraction of quotes you win at each price, which jobs run over, and which customers are worth chasing. |
| A landlord or property manager | Leases and repair records | which units lose money, what a turn actually costs you, and whether the rent has drifted off the market. |
| A farm, feed or equipment dealer | Purchases and sales by month | when to buy deep, when cash gets tight, and which lines carry the year. |
| A salon, barber or clinic | The appointment book | no-shows, who rebooks, and which services are worth the chair time. |
If your business is not on this list, it still keeps records of something — and that something has a question in it. Tell us what you write down and we will tell you what it can answer.
And Yes, The Website Too
The online half
Website numbers are one more record, and often the one that explains why the phone is quiet. Same treatment: read it, translate it, change it.
Which pages people actually read
One page gets all the attention, another gets none. If nobody reads your services page but everyone reads the one with your prices and hours, that tells you which question customers actually have.
What we do: rewrite the ignored page around the question people came for.
Where your visitors come from
Google search, Facebook, a link, or typed straight in. If everything is “direct”, you have regulars and no new customers — a discovery problem, not a branding problem.
What we do: put the effort where people actually arrive from.
The exact words people type
Google gives you the real phrases. If people search “well pump repair Jamestown” and your page says “water system solutions”, you do not exist for the words that pay.
What we do: build pages for the phrases you can win.
Whether Google can find you at all
A page nobody links to and nobody searches for can sit unknown for months with no error message. It looks perfect to you and does not exist to customers. On our own site, 16 of 17 pages were unknown to Google.
What we do: submit properly, fix internal links, watch the count climb.
Which page produced the enquiry
Not just how many forms came in, but which page the person was reading when they filled it in — so you learn which page sells and which one just talks.
What we do: track it, copy the winner, rebuild the loser.
What your Google listing is doing
Views, calls, direction requests. A profile with hundreds of views and two calls has a content and reviews problem, not a traffic problem.
What we do: fix the listing until views turn into calls.
Proof
We ran our own numbers first
This site is the case study, and the reading was not flattering:
- 16 of 17 pages were unknown to Google. Not penalised, not ranking badly — not registered at all. The site was invisible except the home page.
- Every visitor arrived by typing the address or from a link. Nobody came from a search, because nothing was in Google to be found.
- Seven people, twelve visits in a week — mostly us testing. That is not embarrassing, it is informative: the problem is discovery, not conversion.
- A service with no page. Automation was advertised on the home page with nowhere to send anyone.
What came out of it: service pages for the work we actually sell, town pages for the places customers search from, the sitemap submitted to Google, internal links fixed so nothing is an island. Then we kept watching the same numbers to see whether any of it worked — the part most businesses never do.
No invented results. Those are our own live figures, and we will show you yours the same way instead of promising a percentage.
What You Get
Answers you can act on this month
- What each job, product or customer really earns once drive time, parts, callbacks and returns are counted.
- A town-by-town picture of where you are winning and where you are invisible.
- The customers worth keeping, and the ones quietly costing you money.
- Which prices lose money, and what each change would be worth.
- What to stop buying, and what the shelf is holding that should be cash.
- Whether the problem is capacity or just the shape of the week.
- And the website side: how many people found you, what they typed, what they read, whether Google can see each page.
- A short plain-English write-up with the next three things worth doing — and the changes made rather than suggested.
We do not publish fixed prices — a tradesman's job analysis and a shop's stock review are different jobs. Tell us what you have and we will tell you plainly whether the answer is worth paying for yet.
Common Questions
Questions we get asked
What is data analysis, in plain terms?
Adding up the records your business already keeps — job tickets, invoices, till receipts, a customer list, your website numbers — so you can answer the questions you are currently guessing at. Then changing whatever the answer exposes.
My records are a mess. Paper tickets, a spreadsheet, three apps that don't talk to each other.
That is the normal starting point, not a problem. If you can get it out as a list or a spreadsheet, we can read it. Tidying messy records is part of the job.
I am not a technical person. Will I understand any of this?
That is the whole point. You get a written page in plain English and a conversation about it, not a dashboard to learn. If your accountant cannot follow the summary, we have written it badly.
Does this only work for trades and shops?
No. Any business that keeps records has something to answer: a landlord, a salon, a farm, a trucking outfit, a rental yard. If you write things down, there is a question in there worth money.
What would you need from me?
Your records — jobs, customers, sales, appointments — plus whatever you keep on time and money. Addresses and dates are enough for most of the work; names are optional.
Is my customer data safe with you?
We work from a copy, we do not publish or share it, and we will sign whatever you want in writing. If you would rather, strip the names and give us addresses and dates only.
We do not have much data yet.
Then we start by keeping it properly, which costs almost nothing and takes ten minutes to set up. Six months of one useful column beats a warehouse of nothing.
Do I have to install anything or learn software?
No. We install the free web tools, read everything else from your files, and hand you plain English. You get a short report and a list of changes; we do the technical work.
How long before it means something?
Job and customer history usually answers something on the first pass, because the history already exists. Website numbers take a week to be useful and about two months to show a trend.