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Partner Toolkit

It's already in your book.
Here's how to see it.

Two things: how the quote-pipeline problem shows up in books you already keep, and how to talk about Setell without overclaiming. Learning to deliverthe engagement is the Academy's job — this is what tells you who to call.

Fluency

Be able to answer “what is Setell?”

Your client will ask, and a vague answer costs you more than no answer. The one-pager is the whole thing: what it does, what it deliberately does not do, how to say it in an owner’s language, and the claims to never make.

Every claim in it was checked against the product, not against our own marketing — including the things it can't do.

Read the one-pager

Prospecting

What it looks like from where you sit

Don’t ask yourself who would buy this — that’s a sales question and you’ll answer it badly. Ask whose books are already telling you. You’re the one person who has seen the evidence.

“We’re busy but cash is tight.”
The most common sentence in small business, and the quote pipeline is one of the few places it can be true at once. Busy means work is going out; tight means it isn’t coming back as cash. Somewhere between quoting and invoicing there is a gap, and you can measure it.
Estimates in QuickBooks with no status, going back months
Nobody is closing the loop. Not lost, not won — just abandoned. This is the single cleanest tell, and it is visible to you and invisible to the owner, because they experience each estimate once and you can see all of them at once.
Invoices that have no matching estimate
Work is being priced somewhere outside the system — in a text message, on a phone call, in someone’s head. It usually means the estimate function was abandoned as too slow, which is itself the finding.
The owner quotes at night or on weekends
Quoting is competing with running the business, and it loses. That is why quotes go out late and follow-ups never happen. If you know their working hours, you already know this one.
A revenue month that swings hard with no obvious reason
Often a big quote landing or not landing, months after it went out. The pipeline is the leading indicator you have never had a number for.
Any one of these is enough to ask for an export. You are not diagnosing yet — you are earning twenty minutes and a CSV.

Prospecting

Choosing the first client

Your first audit is not the one that finds the most money. It is the one that gets acted on — because a finding nobody acts on teaches you nothing and gets you no second client. Pick for the conversation you will get, not for the mess you will find.

All five, not three of five
They quote for a living
A service business where somebody prices work before doing it — trades, contractors, job shops, field services. If work arrives already priced, there is no pipeline to read.
The estimates are in QuickBooks
The audit reads a QuickBooks estimates export. If they quote out of a notebook or a spreadsheet, they are a real prospect for the conversation but not for the instrument.
Roughly twenty estimates a year or more
Below that, aging and conversion are anecdotes rather than patterns. The tool will tell you when a book is too thin — but you can usually see it coming.
The owner will take your call
The audit is only worth the hour if it reaches the person who can act on it. An office manager cannot decide to change how the business quotes.
They trust you already
You are about to show someone their own numbers in a way nobody ever has. That is a gift from a trusted advisor and an audit from a stranger.
Not these, however tempting
The messiest book you know. It is tempting — the findings will be enormous — but the reason it is messy usually turns out to be the owner, and that owner will not act.
The client who is already annoyed with you about something else. The audit will read as a bill.
A business mid-sale, mid-succession, or mid-crisis. Correct findings, no bandwidth.
Your largest client, first. Run two smaller ones and get your reps in before you spend the relationship that pays your rent.

The Three Instruments

They are not interchangeable

Each answers a different question, and reaching for the wrong one at the wrong moment is the most common way a good finding lands flat. The audit leads — always.

1
Quote Pipeline Audit
Counts what is stuck in your client’s quote pipeline, from their own QuickBooks export.
Open →
Reach for it when
Always first, whenever you can get an export. It is the only one of the three that produces a number belonging to your client that nobody has ever shown them, which is what earns the meeting. Run it on the sample book once before you run it on a real one, so the first time you read the report is not in front of somebody.
How it goes wrong
Waiting to run it until the book is clean. A messy book is the finding. The tool tells you honestly when a book is too thin to read, and that is a result you can act on, not a failure.
2
ROI calculator
What the current process costs over a year — in hours, lost jobs, and margin.
Open →
Reach for it when
In the meeting, live, when the owner asks “so what is this actually costing me?” — which they usually ask right after the aging number lands. Six inputs, and they should give them to you out loud rather than watch you guess. An owner watching their own numbers go into a box argues with the total far less than one handed a printout.
How it goes wrong
Leading with it. It runs on estimates the owner supplies, so used cold it is a hypothetical — and a hypothetical is exactly what your audit made unnecessary. Their real number outranks any model of their number.
3
Cash Cycle Scorecard
Rates the whole quote-to-cash cycle across seven dimensions and hands back a thirty-day playbook.
Open →
Reach for it when
Two moments. When a client will not hand over an export yet — the scorecard needs no data, so it starts the conversation the audit cannot. And after the audit, when the owner asks “is this normal, or is it just me?”
How it goes wrong
Using it as the deliverable. It is a self-assessment: the client scores themselves, which makes it a conversation-starter, not evidence. The audit is the evidence.

Next

Then learn to deliver it

This toolkit gets you to a client and a number. Turning that number into a decision — the audit, the conversation, the action plan they act on — is the Partner Academy, and it opens when you join the program.

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