Cases and evidence
Three companies, and every number with the window in which it was measured
A case study without a time window and without a measurement method is a testimonial dressed up as proof. Here are three companies that built a network of Connectors inside their own business: what was measured, how, and over what period — including the things that weaken the number.
How to read this page
Every figure carries two things with it: the exact period in which it was measured and the way it was counted. It's the Fifth Law applied to ourselves, and it holds even when the result is uncomfortable or when there isn't one yet.
Two of the three cases are closed and measured. The third — the largest — is in progress, and we publish it without the final result, because the final result doesn't exist yet.
01 The case in progress
A network of 850 accountants that referred no one
Simone Brancozzi runs a network of 850 accountants. The channel that on paper should have delivered the most — his own clients — was the one that had been stalled for years. Not because of poor service quality: because of a conflict built into the architecture.
The diagnosis: a structural conflict, not a product one
The network's accountants didn't refer him because, for them, referring meant creating a competitor in their own area. No sales script solves something like that: asking better, asking more often, or asking with a bigger reward would only have raised the cost of the same wrong question.
That's the definition of a structural conflict: the behaviour you want damages the person who's supposed to carry it out. You remove it by redesigning the architecture, not by insisting.
The sector makes the case even sharper: in tax consulting, clients almost never arrive cold. Years of advertising spend judged wasteful had already proven that from the other side.
The architecture: two fronts, one of which was a surprise
First front — external Connectors. Consultants, insurers, trainers: people the accountants know without competing with them. The asymmetry that was blocking everything disappears, because the overlap disappears.
Second front — guaranteed reciprocity, put ahead of everything else. Not promised: guaranteed and put in writing before the first meeting. It even unlocked long-standing clients, the ones who in years had never once given a name.
And there's a planned crescendo: delegated reciprocity is useful in the first rounds, to work out who the best Connectors are; for the most strategic ones, Simone will open the stage of his own events, in front of the whole network.
32
Active external Connectors, versus the 8 planned
At the second month of the programme · the plan called for 8 active by month three · Economy no. 103, September 2026
23
Additional Connectors in onboarding
Same date · people in contact but not yet active: not counted among the 32
12
First qualified referrals on the table
Same date · "qualified" is the article's word: referrals already vetted, not names collected
~10
Spontaneous referrals from long-standing clients
Same date · from the channel that in years had never produced a single one · the front nobody expected
The target, stated as a target
Bringing the share of revenue traceable to referrals to 30% within the following twelve to twenty-four months.
It isn't a result: it's the target. We write it because it's what makes the numbers above legible — 32 active Connectors at month two mean something only if you know what they're heading toward — and we keep it separate from the rest of the page, which is measurement instead.
When the window closes, the result will land here with the same treatment as the other two cases: amount, period, method. Even if it's under 30%.
Two lines from the internal report worth a whole manual
"The room does the work the phone can't."
On the technical webinars that energise Connectors: a room, even a virtual one, gets in an hour what twenty phone calls don't.
"Asking for the truth works better than asking for a favour."
Said after asking the stalled Connectors whether they actually wanted to collaborate, instead of prompting them once more. One replied with a referral.
The daily discipline holding all this up is the same one we describe in Referral Director: an early-morning time block, dedicated only to nurturing relationships, inspired by the Stoic method — focusing only on what depends on you.
Sources for this case. Everything you read here is published in Economy, the official insert of Il Sole 24 Ore: the size of the network, the daily routine, the 30% target and the verdict on advertising spend, in the interview with Oscar Dalvit in no. 102, August 2026; the second month's numbers, the structural conflict and the two quotes from the report, in no. 103, September 2026, the column dedicated to guaranteed reciprocity.
02 The measured case
Ital Tetti: revenue counted referral by referral, and notarised
A cooperative from Rimini, thirty years in business, around thirty employees, roof renovation for homes and industrial buildings. In 2021 consolidated revenue was €5,741,159. It's the best-documented case we have, for one reason only: the measurement was set up before starting, not reconstructed afterward.
The starting situation
Until 2016, acquisition happened through traditional and mostly cold methods, in a market where the quote war was the norm — and where, as chairman Valerio Annichiarico tells it, that war produced company-wide stress even before it produced low margins.
From 2016 the company had already taken two paths: delegating and organising its processes, and investing in acquisition through relationships. Ital Tetti already knew the key was the referral process. What was missing wasn't conviction: it was the architecture.
The architecture built
Profiling is the piece almost nobody replicates: fifteen minutes on the phone with each Connector, with a script built to understand who they really are — family, interests, trade — and therefore who they know. Out of that comes an archive sorted by sphere of influence, and a rating that tells the Referral Director who to call back, and when.
The launch happened in steps: first the satisfied clients, identified through a survey, then opening it up to everyone.
€3,086,300
Revenue generated through referrals
September 2021 – September 2022 · sum of the referrals that closed successfully, entered by partners in the app and notarised one by one · about 20% is attributable to the Superbonus 110%
88%
Of partners were already the company's clients
Same period · of the total activated partners; the remaining 12% were technicians, tradespeople and outside engineers
289
Referrals registered, of which 29 deals closed
Same period · 169 declined and 91 still in progress when the measurement window closed
276
Connectors profiled, 10% rated 4–5 stars
Same period · 34% rated 3–5 stars · the case document reports 276 among the metrics and 275 among the final results
Why this number holds up where others don't
It isn't a report interpreted after the fact. It's the count of referrals entered by partners inside the app, each one notarised on blockchain, with commissions summed only on referrals that closed successfully. A third party can verify it record by record: that's the point where notarisation stops being a technical talking point and becomes the reason you can trust the figure.
The 88% is the most useful figure in the entire case, and it's the one nobody usually looks at. Nearly nine partners out of ten were already Ital Tetti clients: the first source of Connectors isn't bought, you already have it at home.
The three interviews with Valerio, filmed months apart, are public: at the app's launch (in Italian), after three months (in Italian) and after eight months (in Italian).
The three caveats, stated by us first
About 20% of that revenue is attributable to the Superbonus 110%, a scheme that no longer exists. Net of any work attributable to that incentive, about €2.47 million remains: that's the unchallengeable version of the number, and anyone who wants to use only that one is right to.
The window closes in September 2022, four years ago. It's the best-documented case we have because it's the one where the measurement was set up from the start; more recent cases will get the same treatment, not a more convenient one.
The case document states a 7615% ROI, with the formula (Revenue − Marketing costs) / Investment. We don't put it among the measures above, and here's why: that formula divides only by the marketing investment and doesn't count the time of the three Referral Directors, which is the real cost of the programme. An ROI like that isn't comparable to anything, and a number that isn't comparable isn't proof.
03 The short case
Uniac: three months, and a channel that previously had no one in charge
A young company in the training sector: ten locations across Italy, a governing body of twenty-four professionals and forty local offices. It acquired mostly online. Referrals had always been considered important — and left to each salesperson's individual goodwill.
The problem: a process that wasn't a process
Taking care of satisfied clients was delegated to salespeople, who sometimes asked for a referral and sometimes didn't. There was no procedure for systematically proposing that someone become a company partner, and there was no one whose job it was to hold that channel together.
It's the most common state we find: not a company that ignores the value of referrals, but a company that believes in them and has never designed it.
What changed
The biggest difference from Ital Tetti is the scale of the reward: here it's ten times higher as a percentage, because the ticket size is a different order of magnitude entirely. It's one of the things the kickoff's maths calculates instead of copying from the previous case.
€85,900
Revenue generated through referrals
November 2022 – January 2023 · three months · sum of the deals closed through a registered referral
151
Referrals registered, of which 49 deals closed
Same period · 18 declined and 84 still in progress when the measurement window closed
356
Connectors in the programme, 10% rated 4–5 stars
Same period · 12% rated 3–5 stars · the document counts them as total sign-ups, not as profiled
1
Part-time Referral Director, across ten locations
Same period · a single person, not full-time: it's the reason this case covers three months and not three years
What an €85,900 case proves
Less than Ital Tetti proves, and that's worth saying. But it proves the thing that matters to someone weighing whether to start: in three months, with one part-time person, a channel that didn't exist produced 49 closed deals and — for the first time — statistics on a process that previously had none.
The company stopped just "knowing referrals work" and started knowing how many come in, from whom, and how many close. It's the shift from opinion to measurement, and it's the real product of the first few months.
The number nobody usually looks at
Of the 151 referrals registered, by the time the window closed 49 had become deals, 18 had been declined and 84 were still in progress.
Against the total registered that's 32% — roughly one referral in three that became a deal. And it's the cautious count, because the denominator still includes the 84 still open: those weren't lost, they were deals still in progress, so that 32% could only go up.
The count on only the referrals that had already reached a conclusion — 49 closed against 18 declined — would give 73%. It's arithmetically correct and it isn't the number we put on display: excluding from the denominator whatever hasn't been decided yet is exactly how you inflate a statistic. Both are here, with the pieces to redo the calculation.
The boundary
What you won't find on this page
Three cases isn't many, and we know it. Here's what we could have put here and why we didn't: it's the information that says, better than anything else, how we treat numbers.
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A company with forty people in the field
Negotiations with a structured company that has its own sales force are in the early test phase. We don't publish its name, not even disguised, and we don't publish a single number: for it to become a case, three things are needed together — written authorisation, a measured result with its window, and the measurement method alongside it.
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A story written for television
There's a very effective story about a company shifting part of its budget from hunting to farming, complete with numbers and rewards. It was written for a video format and is set in 2029. On video, fiction announces itself with an on-screen marker; a web page can't do that, and anyone reading a story on a page like this one reads it as true. It stays out.
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Projections of what your company would get
They don't exist on this site, and not out of caution: we don't have reliable sector benchmarks, and producing them by eye would mean promising a result. AIRA-SCAN shows you your gap without telling you what closing it would be worth, and that's a deliberate choice.
Looking for the network's numbers rather than each company's — how many Connectors, how much audience, how many matches and with what outcome? They're in The evidence, with the same rules as this page.
Sources. Ital Tetti and Uniac: the respective case study documents produced by Segnalazione Vincente, with data extracted from the APP PRM and the CRM in operation at the two companies. Ital Tetti's referrals are notarised on blockchain one by one, which makes the count verifiable by a third party; Uniac's aren't, and the number is only as good as the CRM record.
Simone Brancozzi: Economy, the official insert of Il Sole 24 Ore. The interview with Oscar Dalvit in no. 102, August 2026, for the size of the network, the daily routine and the stated 30% target; no. 103, September 2026, the column on guaranteed reciprocity, for the second month's numbers, the structural conflict and the two quotes from his internal report. The data remain Brancozzi's: the magazine is where they were published.
Reward percentages, referral counts and time windows are reported exactly as they stand in the source documents. Where a document contradicts itself, the page states so instead of silently picking the nicer figure.
The network, at a glance
The active clubs
Each tile is the APP PRM of an active relational club: a client company that has built its own network of Connectors with us. It isn't a measured number — it's just the network, as it is. Drag to rotate it, bring a club to the front, click to open its landing page.
Drag to rotate the network
The first step
The case missing from this page is yours
Before reading what happened to others, it's worth knowing where you're starting from. AIRA-SCAN© is ten questions and three minutes, no registration required: your company's Relational Potential Index and its widest gaps.
Then the extended report reaches you by email, and within one working day a person calls you: you look at the result together and assess whether the AIRA-DX© Stoic Analysis makes sense for your company. It's free and limited to twelve a week, so it isn't owed to whoever does the check-up: it's decided together.
Prefer to just talk about it? The number is 0549 888808.