Isn't this just a lead magnet for a paid session?

Fair question. The worksheet is deliberately complete — every question is here, the arithmetic is here, and nothing has been held back for a session. You can work through the lot on your own with your last set of accounts in front of you and get a real answer. What a session adds is a second pair of eyes and the awkward follow-up questions: the ones you will not ask yourself about the customer you like but shouldn't keep, or the price you have not raised in four years. If you would rather do it alone, do it alone. A business that closes its gap without us is still better off than one that never looked.

How do I find my gross margin per service when my accounts don't show it?

Most statutory accounts show one blended gross margin, which is exactly why question 2 catches people out. You do not need a new system to answer it. Take your three biggest revenue lines and, for each, write down what it directly costs to deliver — materials, subcontractors, and the hours of your own or your team's time at a realistic loaded rate rather than bare salary. Divide what is left by the revenue. If the three numbers sit within a few points of each other, fine. If one is half the others, you have found something real, and monthly management accounts can then track it for you instead of you rebuilding it by hand each time.

Won't putting my prices up lose me customers?

Some, occasionally — which is why the arithmetic above matters more than the argument in your head. On the illustrative figures, a 3% rise that loses nobody adds £12,000 of net profit, and the business could lose 6.7% of its volume before that rise left it worse off than where it started. Most owners overestimate how price-sensitive their customers are and underestimate how much a small rise compounds. Test it rather than debating it: apply new prices to new work first, hold existing customers on old rates for an agreed period, and watch what actually happens to your conversion rate. That gives you evidence instead of a hunch.

I've answered honestly and the gap looks huge. Where do I start?

Start with one thing, and choose it by discomfort rather than by size. Read back through your answers and find the question you least wanted to answer honestly — that reaction is a reliable signal, and it is usually pointing at something you already suspected. Then write a single specific action with a date attached: the price you will review by the end of the month, the invoice you will chase on Friday, the task you will hand over next week. Not "look into it". A large gap is almost never one dramatic fix; it is three or four smaller ones that compound. Fixing one properly and watching the number move builds more momentum than a twelve-point plan that stalls in week two.

How often should I redo the worksheet?

Every three to six months, and always after something material changes — a price rise, a significant new customer, a hire, a supplier increase. The Value Gap is not a fixed diagnosis; it moves as the business does, and the questions you could not answer last time are usually the ones worth checking first. Keep your previous answers so you can compare rather than starting from scratch each time. Over a year, the most useful signal is not whether the gap shrank but whether the number of questions you can answer with an actual figure went up. That is the difference between running a business on data and running it on instinct.

Does this work if I'm a one-person business?

Yes, and arguably more so. A one-person business has no slack to absorb a badly priced job, and the owner is by definition the bottleneck in every section of the worksheet. The pricing and cash questions work unchanged. The delegation questions still apply, even if the answer turns out to be a subcontractor, a virtual assistant or a piece of software rather than an employee — the underlying question of what genuinely only you can do is the same. One adjustment matters: cost your own hours at a realistic rate when you work out margin. Treating your time as free is the most common reason a sole trader's best-looking work turns out not to be.

The Value Gap Worksheet: Find Hidden Profit

What the Value Gap actually is

Every business has one. Most owners have never measured it. The Value Gap is the distance between what your business is currently generating and what it's actually capable of generating, given the customers, the team and the systems you already have. It's not a hypothetical "what if you doubled in size" number — it's the cash and performance you're leaving on the table right now, inside the business you already run.

None of it shows up as a single line on a set of accounts. It shows up as a business that works harder than it should for the results it gets. And you can't close a gap you haven't identified — most owners have a vague sense that "things could be better" without being able to point to where, by how much, or what to do about it first.

Where the gap usually hides

In our experience, the Value Gap tends to cluster in a handful of places: pricing that was set years ago and never revisited against rising costs; cash management that reacts to problems instead of forecasting them; time spent by the owner on tasks that should have been delegated long ago; and missed opportunities — services you could offer, customers you could retain better, margin you could protect — that simply haven't been looked at properly. It's rarely one dramatic fix. It's normally three or four smaller things that, added together, make a real difference to what the business actually generates.

The worksheet

Set aside twenty minutes, be honest with yourself, and answer these questions for your business as it stands today — not how you'd like it to be.

Pricing & margin

When did you last review your prices against your actual costs, rather than just against last year's price list?
Do you know your gross margin on your top three products or services, individually?
Are any customers or contracts quietly loss-making, or close to it, once you account for the time they take?
Could you name one thing you're currently underpricing, if you're honest?
When did you last say no to a piece of work because the margin wasn't good enough?

Cash

Do you know, right now, what your cash position looks like in 90 days' time — not just today?
How much cash is currently tied up in invoices over 60 days old?
Is there a recurring pinch point in the month or year where cash always gets tight — and do you plan around it, or just react to it?
Do you have a clear view of upcoming tax bills, or do they tend to arrive as a surprise?
If a large customer paid 30 days late this month, would it actually matter to the business?

Growth blockers

What's the one thing that, if it were fixed, would make the biggest difference to the business in the next twelve months?
Is that thing actually being worked on, or has it been "on the list" for over six months?
Are you the bottleneck for any decision that a system, a process or another person could handle instead?
What opportunity have you turned down in the last year purely because you didn't have the capacity to take it on?
If you took two weeks off with no contact, what would actually go wrong?

Where you spend your time

What did you spend most of last week doing — and was it the highest-value use of your time?
What's one task you're still doing yourself that someone else could do at least reasonably well?
How much of your week is spent reacting to problems versus planning ahead?

What a Value Gap looks like in numbers

The questions above are only useful if you can see what answering them is worth. Here is an illustrative business — not a client, just figures you can follow and swap for your own. It turns over £400,000, runs a 42% gross margin, and carries £140,000 of overheads.

Gross profit: £400,000 × 42% = £168,000
Less overheads of £140,000
Net profit: £28,000 — a 7% net margin

The pricing question, priced

Say question 4 lands, and the owner puts prices up by 3%. Nobody leaves. Turnover becomes £412,000. Cost of sales is unchanged at £232,000, because they are delivering exactly the same work. Gross profit becomes £180,000, and net profit becomes £40,000.

A 3% price move added £12,000 — a 43% increase in net profit — with no extra delivery, no extra staff and no extra risk. To add that same £12,000 by selling more at the existing margin, the business would need an extra £28,571 of turnover: a 7.1% sales increase, with all the delivery cost and hassle that comes with it.

The obvious objection is that customers leave. Run that too. At a 3% rise, the business could lose 6.7% of its volume and still be exactly where it started on gross profit — and it would be delivering less work to get there. That is the number to argue with, rather than the feeling. How to price for profit goes further into how to move a price without losing the room.

The cash question, priced

Now question 7. The same business turns over £400,000, which is £1,095.89 a day. If customers pay on an average of 62 days, £67,945 is sitting in debtors. Get that to 35 days and it is £38,356.

The difference — £29,589 — is cash released into the business. It is more than the entire year's net profit, and it did not require a single extra sale. It is not new profit; it is your own money arriving sooner, which is precisely what stops a profitable business running out of cash. A rolling cashflow forecast is how you see this coming rather than discovering it.

The quiet loss-maker, priced

Question 3 is the one that stings. A customer billing £18,000 a year looks like a good account. Work out what delivering it actually costs: 340 hours of your team's time at a loaded rate of £45 an hour is £15,300. That leaves £2,700 of gross margin — a 15% margin against the 42% the business averages.

They are not a bad customer. They are a badly priced one, and the difference matters, because the fix is a conversation rather than a goodbye. Earning the house margin on that work means a price of £26,379 rather than £18,000, which adds £8,379 of gross profit from a single conversation. You cannot have that conversation until you know the number, which is the entire point of the worksheet.

How to score it

There are eighteen questions. Go back through and mark each one with N if you answered it with an actual figure, or F if you answered it with a feeling. Then count the Ns.

13 or more. You know your business. Your Value Gap is an execution problem — the answers are there, they just aren't being acted on. Pick one and put a date on it.
7 to 12. The most common result. You know the business well in the areas you enjoy and are guessing in the rest. Your gap is concentrated wherever the Fs cluster; that's where to look first.
6 or fewer. The gap isn't the problem yet — visibility is. You cannot price, forecast or delegate on instinct indefinitely. Monthly management accounts turn most of the Fs into Ns within a quarter, and everything else gets easier afterwards.

The score matters less than the trend. Redo this in six months and the useful question is not whether the gap shrank, but whether more of your answers became numbers.

How to use this worksheet

Don't try to fix everything at once — that's how good intentions turn into nothing changing. Instead, read back through your answers and pick the single question that made you most uncomfortable to answer honestly. That discomfort is usually a signal. Write down one concrete action you could take on it this month, not "look into it eventually" but something specific — a price you'll actually review, an invoice you'll actually chase, a task you'll actually hand off. Revisit the whole worksheet again in three to six months. The Value Gap isn't a one-off diagnosis; it moves as the business does, which is exactly why it's worth checking more than once.

What to do with your answers

You'll almost certainly find you can answer some of these confidently and others not at all. The gaps in your answers are usually a good proxy for where the Value Gap itself is hiding — pricing you haven't looked at, cash you're not forecasting, or a bottleneck you already know about but haven't tackled.

If you want a second pair of eyes on it, this is exactly what our Your Business Roadmap session is built for — a free 60-minute session where we work through your numbers using our Value Gap Calculator to identify where cash is being left on the table and where there's genuine opportunity to improve performance. You walk away with a clear, specific picture rather than a generic checklist.