Free tool
How much to invest in marketing, and what a customer is worth
Five numbers from your business and the calculator tells you what budget you can carry, what each customer is really worth, and how many inquiries you need each month for marketing to pay for itself. No sign-up, no email.
How it is calculated
The budget comes from your revenue: 5% as a prudent floor and 8% as the ceiling, which is the reference the SBA (the US federal small business agency) cites for small businesses. A customer’s value is what they pay times how often they buy in a year, and profit is that value times your margin. From there, the customers you need are the budget divided by profit, and the inquiries are those customers divided by your close rate.
What it does not calculate
It does not know what an inquiry costs in your sector or your city: your campaign tells you that after two weeks of running. And it does not know whether you answer the phone. The most sensitive number in the whole formula is the close rate, and that goes up or down with how fast you respond, not with the budget.
Our opinion, after looking at the books of many small businesses: almost nobody has a budget problem. They have an unanswered-inquiries problem, and that one gets fixed sooner and cheaper.
What to do with the result
If the number of inquiries looks reachable, the next step is deciding which channel brings them: local SEO if people already search for you, Google Ads if you need volume this week, and in both cases someone who answers every inquiry within minutes. If the number looks impossible, the problem is the ticket or the close rate, and marketing does not fix that.