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The Problem

Put your homepage next to your 3 closest competitors and cover the logos. Could a buyer pick out yours? When a buyer cannot tell 4 businesses apart, price is the only tool they have left to choose with.

That is not a marketing problem. Every trade has an unwritten contract: what is free, how you quote, how fast you reply, who you say it is for, what nobody will do. New businesses copy it from whoever was there first. So everyone ends up honouring the same clauses, including the ones buyers quietly hate.

This book shows you how to write that contract down from what your competitors publish, find the clauses worth changing, decide what to do with each one, price the result, and test it on 20 real sales calls before you touch your website.

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The Contract Map and the Clause Decisions

First you map the contract: 5 competitors and 1 substitute, 8 rows on what they publish, 3 rows on who pays, uses and influences, and 6 rows on where the buyer gets stuck, from finding you to the job ending. Any row where everyone agrees is a clause.

Then every clause gets exactly one decision. Most get Keep. The ones that matter get one of 5 moves, made in this order:

Then the arithmetic: what Drop and Shrink free up per job has to pay for what Own and Break cost per job. If it does not, you cut more. If nothing gets dropped, nothing changed.

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What's in the Book

• Chapter 1, The 15-Minute Check: cover the logos, write the line only you can say, and count how many of your last 90 days of quotes came down to price. Free to read.
• Chapter 2, Why Everyone In Your Trade Looks The Same: the unwritten contract, how it spreads, and why sameness forces price.
• Chapter 3, Map The Contract: the 17-row map from what competitors publish, and how to read it for clauses.
• Chapter 4, Look Where Competitors Do Not: 5 places gaps hide that a competitor list cannot show you: other ways to get the job done, people who do not buy, the buyer chain, what buyers buy around you, and narrowing who it is for.
• Chapter 5, Your Baseline: guess your win rate, count it, compare, then ask 10 customers why they picked you, word for word.
• Chapter 6, The Clause Decisions: the 5 moves, the 6 rules, the funding arithmetic and how to actually stop something.
• Chapter 7, Test It: Care, Real, Ours: does a buyer want it, can you deliver it every Monday, and would copying it force a competitor to change how they operate.
• Chapter 8, Price The Position: where buyers already spend across every alternative, where your floor sits under it, and how to tell whether holding price is worth more to you than winning more work.
• Chapter 9, The Own-It Sentence and the 20-Call Test: one sentence, an expected result written down before call 1, a one-line-per-call log and a stop rule.
• Then: a hypothetical garage door company carried through every step, 3 short teaching scenarios, 1 owner whose gap failed the test, a 30-day sprint, a scorecard, 10 common mistakes and the 30 and 90 day look-backs.

Deliverables

• 12 paper templates: contract map, 5 places to look, baseline, clause decisions, funding arithmetic, stop plan, the three tests, price band, Own-It sentence, 20-call log, scorecard, look-back
• A printable 2-page Contract Map (landscape, prints aligned at Letter or 11x17)
• A monthly tracker (CSV) for named reasons, win rate with count, average sale, discount given and sentence follow-ups
• The One-Afternoon Plan: the first 3 hours, step by step

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A Sample: Can You Afford The Change?

A hypothetical garage door company decides to drop the free drive-out estimate on standard jobs and quote from photos instead. That frees $38 a job in drive time and fuel. She shrinks a 12-page quote to 2 pages, which frees $10 of office time. She owns same-day response, at $15 a job, and breaks the contract with a written door report left on every job, at $20. Freed: $38 + $10 = $48. New spend: $15 + $20 = $35. Net: $48 − $35 = $13 a job left over. Every number is a round hypothetical. The book shows you how to run it on yours, and what to do when the answer comes out negative.

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Questions

Does it tell me what my position should be? No. It gives you the method to find it from your own market and test it on your own calls. Nobody outside your market can see your contract.

Are there case studies or results in it? No. Every example is a labelled hypothetical that shows the decision, not an outcome. One of them goes wrong on purpose. We do not publish client results.

Will it tell me what win rate or price to aim for? No. There are no industry averages and no targets in it. Your first count is your baseline, and the scorecard compares you to it.

How is it different from Map Your Business On One Page? That book looks inward and ranks your own customers. This one looks outward, at competitors, substitutes and people who do not buy at all.

Do I need to redesign my website? Not yet. The sentence has to survive 20 sales calls first. The homepage comes last.

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Who This Is For

The owner of a local service business in a crowded market (a garage door company, a plumber, a cleaner, a salon, a landscaper) who looks interchangeable with the competition, ends up discounting to win, and has never written down what their trade silently agrees to do the same way.

It is not a swipe file. It is for owners willing to stop doing at least 1 thing, so that what they claim is actually true.