The operational method
How we work
It isn't a course, it isn't a campaign and it isn't software you buy. It's a system built inside the company in a single day, delivered in writing within ten days, and then executed every morning — by one person, before anything else. What follows is the whole journey, with nothing hidden.
The line that closes every kickoff
"We're not asking you for €150,000. We're asking you for 2 hours and 20 minutes a day. For 12 months. The result is maths, not hope."
It isn't a closing line: it's the real contract. Everything on this page exists to make that sentence defensible, number by number.
The method's signature
INPUTS depend on you. OUTPUTS are a consequence.
The real secret
"The real secret isn't found in theory, but in the field. We're asking you for 2 hours and 20 minutes a day of ruthless execution. For 12 months. When the INPUT is certain, the result is maths, not hope."
Calls made, follow-ups carried out, surveys sent, invitations dispatched are INPUTS: they depend on a person, a schedule and a decision made in the morning. Revenue, signed contracts, closing times are OUTPUTS: the market decides those.
That's why we never ask a business owner to commit to a revenue figure. We ask them to commit to a block of time and a number of actions — and then we show with arithmetic why those actions produce that revenue.
The practical consequence: there are no excuses
If the week's inputs were honoured but the outputs don't arrive, the problem is one of quality: scripts to calibrate, targeting to fix, poorly qualified referrals. That's where you intervene, data in hand, and it's exactly the work of the three months of follow-up.
If the inputs weren't honoured there's nothing to analyse: the system wasn't fed. No script, no software and no higher reward can make up for a machine that was never switched on.
It's the shortest discussion in the world, and it saves months of wrong guesses.
The journey
Five stages, and the first two cost nothing
The method's four phases — diagnosis, maths, architecture, routine — aren't four separate appointments. The first three all happen on the kickoff day; the fourth starts right after and never really ends.
| Stage | What happens | When | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 · The AIRA-SCAN© questionnaire | The profiling questions that position the company across the four vital areas. | Three minutes, online | Free |
| 2 · AIRA-DX© Stoic Analysis | The report: the Gap in each area, the main wound, the Maturity Level and three surgical priorities. | PDF up front, then a 20-minute call | Free |
| 3 · The kickoff day | Eight hours on-site with the CEO, sales leadership, customer service and the designated Referral Director. | 9:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m., a single day | Decided after the diagnosis |
| 4 · The Operating Manual | Everything that emerged, in writing: diagnosis, maths, architecture, routine, the 90-day roadmap. | Within 7-10 days of the kickoff | Included |
| 5 · The three months of follow-up | Weekly review, Monday call, monthly review of the whole funnel. | 90 days after the kickoff | Decided after the diagnosis |
From the third stage on we don't publish a price list, and it isn't secrecy: the therapy is prescribed after the diagnosis, and before the diagnosis any figure would be made up. The order of magnitude and the three things that move it depend on your business.
01 The diagnosis
The company CT scan doesn't look at marketing: it looks at the structure
Where the money comes in, where it goes out, who decides, who executes, where time is lost and where margin is lost. Not the brand, not the aesthetics, not the communications — that's the surface, and treating the surface is the most expensive mistake in consulting.
The Stoic Analysis report arrives before the day; the questionnaire is analysed 48 hours before the kickoff, so the day isn't wasted collecting data. On-site, the diagnosis is validated: we look at the real management figures, listen to whoever answers the phone, and whatever the report had inferred either gets confirmed or falls.
The result isn't a report card. It's the choice of the three areas to work on over the next ninety days and, above all, of the ones not to work on: a plan that tries to fix everything fixes nothing.
What goes on the table, that day
Reorganising the offer produces two objects with a precise name: the Trojan Horse product, the one that's easy to get in with, and the Cash Cow, the one that actually pays. They almost never coincide, and the company had almost never told them apart.
02 The maths
From the euro target to this morning's phone calls
You start from the number the business owner has in mind and work backward, step by step, down to how many actions are needed each morning. It's done live, on screen, in front of everyone in the room.
The six mandatory figures
Without these six numbers, the reverse engineering isn't possible, and the day can't happen. It's why the questionnaire is analysed beforehand.
The KPI-Alpha is the year's financial target, the one that holds up everything else. From there you work down: how many clients are needed, how many referrals to make one client, how many active partners to produce those referrals, how many calls to build those partners.
How it sounds, in the end
Demonstration example taken from the Operating Manual of VERTEA SRL: the company and its numbers are fictional, the structure of the calculation is the real one.
"To generate €1,200,000 of incremental revenue a year you need 13 active partners producing 1 referral a month each. To build them you need 31 partners enrolled in the Efficient Business Club, recruited in 90 days from a filtered base of 210 clients. The Referral Director dedicates 2 hours a day."
When the target becomes thirteen partners and two hours in the morning, it stops being a wish and becomes a list of things to do. That's the whole value of this phase.
The plan has to hold up even when it's wrong.
Every calculation is redone twice: with the expected conversion rate and with a deliberately pessimistic one. If the plan only holds up in the good scenario, it isn't a plan, it's a bet — and then you change the plan before starting, not six months in.
03 The architecture
If no one introduces you to anyone, it's almost never the incentive's fault
The classic mistake is raising the percentage. We approach it as a transactional process, and forget that the person in front of us — if they're a serious professional — isn't trying to become your business scout: they're trying to grow their own business.
The real problem: the missing reciprocity
Most companies don't offer reciprocity, and so they never put on the table the thing everyone actually wants: to be introduced, in turn, to someone their own prospective client already knows. If we could guarantee reciprocity to anyone, we'd probably have a large share of the people around us ready to act — because they'd see much more than a simple commission in the reward.
Reputational exposure. Whoever introduces a supplier puts their own credibility on the line. If something goes wrong, the company doesn't bear the damage: the person who gave their name does. The perceived cost is high, the benefit is low, and silence is the rational choice.
Or inefficiency. "If I have to repay everyone who helps me with a key contact, I become inefficient." These are two different fears with the same effect — fear of getting burned or fear of wasting time — and on their own they're enough to kill any financial incentive.
A documented precedent: a company with over a thousand satisfied clients and spontaneous referrals close to zero. The problem wasn't the product or the incentives: it was that every referral created a competitor at home for the person making it — reciprocity, in that case, would have cost them their own client base.
The solution: we guarantee the reciprocity
Delegate reciprocity to us — from the very start, without wasting time and without putting your own sphere of influence at risk. Through MigaMATCH we're the ones who sit your partner down with the right people. Guaranteed.
In the case above, the architecture simply excluded the conflict: referrals only to non-competitors — a different province, a different specialisation. The perceived cost of the referral drops to zero and resistance collapses without raising a single cent of fee.
The rest of the design works on the same principle: written protocols that remove the risk of disintermediation, partner clusters chosen for complementarity and not for personal rapport, a compensation system calculated on the real margin of your ticket and not copied from someone else.
And the real lever is rarely money. A professional doesn't change behaviour for a commission; they change behaviour if someone brings them three new clients. A fee moves no one, an open door does: it's the Reciprocity Engine put into accounting form, and it's why rewards can also be spent in Match Credit.
What actually comes out of the afternoon
04 The routine
Everything that comes before exists to make one single page possible
Diagnosis, maths and architecture aren't the plan: they're the proof that the plan is right. The real plan is the routine, and it's surprisingly short.
| Block | Duration | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Dashboard | 10 min | The APP PRM and CRM are opened: today's actions, referrals that came in overnight, statuses to update. No email replies in this block. |
| Hunting | 40 min | Two new contacts, twenty minutes each. Fixed sequence: open with the benefit, introduce the Club, ask, send the link while still on the phone. |
| Follow-up | 30 min | Callbacks to whoever said "let me think about it", with the deadline written down. It's the block almost no company has, and it's where most of the value dies. |
| Collection | 25 min | Appointments born from the referrals received are set, handed off to salespeople, and statuses are updated. |
| Admin | 15 min | The day's numbers are written into the week's report and tomorrow's list is prepared. |
The 10:30 rule
The routine starts at 8:30, before anything else. If it isn't completed by 10:30, the day is compromised. There are no exceptions and no afternoon catch-ups.
It's an end deadline, not a start one, and the difference isn't a technicality: a routine started at 10:25 is a routine that didn't happen.
Hunting happens in the morning, when energy is highest and people answer. The afternoon is farming: you cultivate what was sown in the morning.
Four numbers, and there's no hidden fifth one
The whole analysis converges into a handful of weekly actions, always the same ones, carried out by a single person in the morning. In the VERTEA demonstration example that's ten new contacts a week, six to eight follow-ups, eighteen surveys sent to the client base and a hundred per cent of the "yeses" turned into formal sign-up — because if someone doesn't sign up, it wasn't a yes.
Your four numbers will be different, because they come out of your KPI-Alpha's maths. What doesn't change is that there are four, they're counted every Friday with a pen, and they fit on a single sheet.
There's one metric that outranks all the others: how many new partners joined the Club this week. If the Club grows, referrals arrive; if the Club doesn't grow, no other metric makes up for it.
The day
From 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., and every block has its own time
The CEO is there, along with sales leadership, customer service and the designated Referral Director. It isn't a presentation: it's a working day with a written agenda, and by the end there's a system in place that didn't exist before. This is the agenda, stripped down to the bone.
| Time | Block | What comes out of it |
|---|---|---|
| 09:00 – 09:30 | Opening. Expectations are aligned and the principle holding everything up is made clear: inputs depend on you, outputs are a consequence. One question only, and it isn't a formality: what's the single result that would make this the best investment of the year? | The expected result, said out loud |
| 09:30 – 10:00 | The offer. All the products with their prices and the real revenue distribution. We look for the Trojan Horse product, the one that's easy to get in with, and the Cash Cow, the one that actually pays. And the real average ticket, not the list-price one. | The value ladder, and what partners will push |
| 10:00 – 10:30 | Profiling. The typical day of whoever will be executing, and how many hours they really have. This is where you find out who's the Brain and who's the Engine — and you ask, without beating around the bush, how they'd react to a block of phone calls every morning for two months straight. | The Referral Director chosen, and whether they need support |
| 10:30 – 11:00 | The structure. The funnel as it is today, who sells, who answers the phone, who meets people all day without anyone ever having asked them to introduce someone. | The mapped funnel and possible recruiters |
| 11:15 – 12:00 | ⚠ The relational architecture. Forty-five minutes, and it's the block that determines everything else. The structural conflict is surfaced, the actors and flows that remove it are mapped out, the nodes the plan depends on are decided. Without these decisions, we don't proceed: the maths would be built on nothing and the manual couldn't be written. | The validated architecture and the decided nodes |
| 12:00 – 12:30 | The maths. The six mandatory figures, recalibrated on what was just decided, and the reverse engineering done live on screen: from the euro target down to every morning's actions. Two scenarios, and the Stoic question — I'm asking you for these hours a day: for how long? | The company's formula, and the chosen scenario |
| 12:30 – 13:00 | The influence map. Three exercises with real names: who your clients listen to, the twelve target-client types with the ideal partner for each, the first five names to start from. If the names come easily, the network is alive; if it's a struggle, it was a list and not a community. | Twelve targets and the first five names |
| Time | Block | What comes out of it |
|---|---|---|
| 14:00 – 14:20 | The Club. What it's called, how to present it in thirty seconds, what exactly the Referral Director does. One non-negotiable principle: they don't do telemarketing, they build bridges. | Name, presentation script, role |
| 14:20 – 14:50 | The four channels. The survey to the client base, which is the primary channel; internal recruiters; scouting on the Connector Network; events. You decide which one to start with, you don't switch all of them on at once. | The channels in priority order |
| 14:50 – 15:15 | Compensation and the Reciprocity Engine. How much and how you give back, and above all in what: money, or open doors. Percentages are calculated on the real margin of your ticket, never copied from someone else's case. | The confirmed compensation plan |
| 15:15 – 15:30 | The APP PRM. How a referral is registered, how it's tracked, what the person who made it sees, what ends up notarised. And the configuration: statuses, roles, welcome emails. | The tool configured |
| 15:45 – 16:20 | The arsenal. Recurring objections with the reply, and the two elevator pitches — the one for whoever introduces and the one for whoever recruits. They're rehearsed out loud, right there, thirty seconds each. A script that hasn't been said out loud in the room isn't a script. | Objections and pitches tested, not just written |
| 16:20 – 17:00 | The callback system. Every contact gets a score and the score decides when to call them back — thirty days, forty-five, sixty. Then the pipeline statuses, the automatic reminders and the pre-qualification call script. | No more "I'll call them back when I remember" |
| 17:00 – 17:45 | Routine, KPIs and roadmap. The protected morning time slot, block by block, the dashboard with effort metrics kept separate from result metrics, and the ninety days with the milestones for month one, two and three. | The plan for the day after tomorrow morning |
| 17:45 – 18:00 | The close. A recap of decisions, follow-up dates set on the calendar, and the stern note that's always the same: the routine starts at 8:30 the day after tomorrow; if it isn't completed by 10:30, the day is compromised. No excuses. | A commitment to a block of time, not to a revenue figure |
Breaks are mid-morning, at lunch and mid-afternoon, and they serve us too: that's where we decide whether the designated Referral Director is the right person. The half hour before 9:00 a.m. isn't with you — it's our internal alignment. The times shift by a few minutes at every company; the order doesn't, because every block uses what the previous block decided.
The delivery
Everything arrives in writing within ten days
The Operating Manual is the document the company receives within 7-10 days of the kickoff day. It isn't meeting minutes: it's the company's x-ray, the mathematical breakdown of its target, and a plan that says what to do the following morning, block by block.
Almost no one, before starting, imagines how far the analysis goes. Most people expect "a referral programme"; what they receive is a document that gets printed, kept on the desk, and filled in with a pen every Friday.
An operating manual that stays in a shared folder hasn't failed because it was wrong: it's failed because no one turned it into a routine.
The four sections
A complete demonstration copy exists, built on a fictional company: the names and numbers are made up, the method, structure and maths are exactly what a real client receives.
We don't put it on display: it's discussed in the call that follows the check-up. It's a sixty-page document, and sending it to someone who hasn't done a diagnosis yet wouldn't help either side.
The ninety days after
The moment people give up is always the same one, and we cover it
For the first two months, a programme like this produces zero euros: the network is being built. Whoever judges it there declares it a failure, at exactly the moment it's about to switch on. The three months of follow-up exist to cover that stretch of the curve.
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Friday, 45 minutes
The Referral Director fills in the KPI report, looks at the variances and prepares next week's named list. In the first three months they do it alongside us, not alone.
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Monday, 30 minutes
The week's numbers, one bottleneck and one corrective action. A sample recorded phone call is analysed: it's the tool that shortens the learning curve the most.
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Every month, the whole funnel
Real step-by-step conversions, script calibration, checking that the morning time slot was respected. And one strategic decision a month, not five.
In total it's about 24 hours of support spread across the three months. The most important part isn't the strategic advice: it's that every Friday someone checks whether the routine was carried out. If it was skipped for more than 30% of the month's working days, that becomes the problem — before any discussion about scripts, compensation or the market.
The first step
Before the diagnosis, the measurement
The journey above starts long before the kickoff day: it starts with AIRA-SCAN©. Ten questions, three minutes, no registration, and at the end you have your company's Relational Potential Index.
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, and the contact page also has the form.