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On this page: The rule

The rule
The definitions
The four disclosures
Applied to us
Five questions
Book the diagnosis

The footnote for every number on this site

Show the work,
or do not print the number.

We audited six firms in our category. Five of the six publish results claims you cannot check. None of the six publish a method for producing them. That gap is the entire reason this page exists. Every figure anywhere on this site should be traceable back to a definition written here, and if you find one that is not, it is a mistake and we want to hear about it.

See the definitions Five questions to ask any agency

The receipts

Measured on documents, not on memory $227 first commission → $1.3M/yr renewal book every figure sourced 4.9★ across 519 FreedInsure reviews

The rule

One rule, and it costs us claims

It is a single sentence, and it is the reason some of the numbers you would expect on a marketing site are missing from ours.

If we cannot show you where a number came from, we do not print it.

Not a softer version of it, not a rounded version of it, not the version with the bad quarter trimmed off the front. A number we cannot source is a number we delete. That rule has cost us real claims. We have watched clients produce results we are proud of and could not publish, because the before-figure lived in somebody's head instead of in a system, and a claim with no baseline is a story with a number attached.

The rule cuts both directions. It also means the figures we do publish have paperwork behind them, and we will walk any serious buyer through that paperwork on a call. Ask us for the source of anything on this site. If the answer is slow or vague, that is a finding about us, and you should treat it the way we would treat it in a diagnosis.

The definitions

Every metric we cite, with its actual formula

Most arguments about performance are really arguments about definitions. Two people can look at the same month and disagree by half because one counts opportunities and the other counts inquiries. Here is exactly what each word means when we use it.

Metric 01

Speed to lead

The elapsed time between the moment a lead is created and the moment a human being actually speaks to them. Not the time to an automated text. Not the time to a first dial attempt. Time to a conversation. We report the median, not the average, because one lead answered eleven hours late drags an average into fiction while the median tells you what a typical lead experienced.

Speed to lead = timestamp of first live human conversation − timestamp the lead record was created. Reported as the median across all leads in the window. Business hours are not excluded.

Why it is first: it is the cheapest thing on this list to fix and the most expensive thing to ignore. The speed-to-lead argument is written out here.

Metric 02

Close rate

Closed-won deals divided by qualified opportunities from the same cohort. Two words there do the work. Qualified means the prospect met a written standard before entering the denominator, and that standard has to be written down before the period starts or it will quietly loosen when the month goes badly. Cohort means we track the leads that entered in a period all the way to their outcome, rather than dividing this month's wins by this month's new leads, which flatters you when volume drops.

Close rate = closed-won deals from cohort C ÷ qualified opportunities in cohort C × 100. Cohort C is fully resolved before the rate is reported. Open deals are excluded from both sides, not counted as losses.

Metric 03

Cost per lead versus cost per acquisition

These get used interchangeably by people selling leads, and the swap is almost always in the seller's favor. Cost per lead counts inquiries. Cost per acquisition counts customers. A lead source can win on cost per lead and lose badly on cost per acquisition, which is exactly how a business ends up spending more to make less. We quote both, and when we quote only one, it is cost per acquisition.

Cost per lead = total media and lead-purchase spend in the window ÷ leads created in the window.
Cost per acquisition = total media and lead-purchase spend attributed to the window ÷ customers closed from that spend. Spend includes agency fees when the agency is us.

Metric 04

Retention and renewal share

The share of what you had at the start of a period that is still there at the end of it. The trap is the unit. Retention measured on customer count, on revenue, and on contracts can produce three different answers from the same book, and a seller will quote whichever is highest. We state the unit every time, and for the FreedInsure figures the unit is commission line items, which is the hardest of the three to flatter.

Renewal share = units active at the end of the period that were also active at its start ÷ units active at the start × 100. Unit is named explicitly. New business acquired during the period is excluded from both sides.

Metric 05

CAC and LTV

Customer acquisition cost is everything you spent to get a customer, divided by the customers you got. Everything means media, lead purchases, agency fees, and the loaded cost of the people doing the selling. Lifetime value is gross profit per customer per period multiplied by how many periods they stay. Use gross profit, not revenue. Revenue-based LTV is the single most common way a business talks itself into an unprofitable channel. The ratio between them is the number that matters, and we have written the long version of that argument.

CAC = (media + lead purchases + agency fees + loaded sales payroll) ÷ new customers, same window.
LTV = average gross profit per customer per period × average number of periods retained.
Reported as LTV : CAC, with the retention assumption stated.

Those five definitions are the five systems a diagnosis grades. If you want a rough read on which one is leaking before you go pull the real numbers, the ten-question revenue leak quiz scores them in about two minutes.

The four disclosures

A formula is not enough. Four things have to travel with it.

You can define close rate perfectly and still publish a meaningless claim. The definition tells you what was counted. These four tell you whether the count means anything.

The baseline: what it was before"Up 300 percent" means nothing without the starting figure. Three closes a month becoming twelve is a real result. One becoming four is a rounding error with a percentage sign. We publish the before-number and the after-number, and when the before-number was never recorded, we say the claim cannot be made rather than estimating it backwards.
The window: how long, and which monthsEvery window we publish is stated with both endpoints, and it includes the bad months. A result measured over one strong quarter is a sample, not an outcome. If a claim covers a period that conveniently starts after the slump and ends before the drop-off, the window is doing the work, not the work.
Attribution: what tracking can and cannot proveOffline conversion tracking can prove a click, a form fill, a call, and that a closed deal was linked to a source in your CRM. It cannot prove causation, it cannot see the billboard or the referral that made someone search your name, and it double-counts across platforms because every ad platform claims the same conversion. We report attributed results as attributed, never as caused.
Verification: who checked, and against whatClient results are read out of the client's own system, and the client sees the figure before we publish anything with their name on it. Our own figures come from documents a third party already examined. Nothing on this site is verified by us saying it twice.

BaselineThe before-number, printed next to the after-number

WindowBoth endpoints stated, bad months included

AttributionAttributed, never called caused

UnitNamed every time: customers, revenue or contracts

SourceThe document the figure was read out of

Simulation — how a claim gets cleared

DefineMetric matched to a written formula on this page

SourceFigure traced to a system export or a statement

DiscloseBaseline, window and unit attached to the claim

PublishCleared — or deleted, if any step comes back empty

Applied to us

Where our own numbers come from

A methodology page that only grades other people is a marketing page. Here is the rule turned on the figures we repeat most often.

Where these numbers come from: a bank-reconciled monthly profit and loss statement, lifetime FMO commission statements, and carrier-level book exports — the same documents a buyer's diligence team works from. Revenue figures are cash-basis totals for completed fiscal years. Renewal share is measured on commission line items, not on customer headcount, because commission lines are the hardest unit to flatter. The book snapshot is a live in-force export, not a report we assembled.

That disclosure is the same one printed on the FreedInsure case study, and it is deliberately identical, because a methodology that changes depending on which page you land on is not a methodology. The figures it covers are the ones you will see repeated across this site: a $227 first month, a book that reached $1.3M a year with roughly three-quarters of it renewing, 3,046 policies in force, and licensing across roughly 40 states. The 4.9-star rating across 519 Google reviews is public and you can count it yourself, which is the only reason we quote it without further sourcing.

Two people built that. There is no third figure hiding behind the ones above, and there is no client count, revenue claim, or performance statistic anywhere on this site that we have not either sourced to a document or declined to publish. If you want the reasoning behind any of it in plain language, the straight answers page covers what we get asked most.

The same rule applies to our own marketing going forward. We published the keywords we are chasing before we started ranking for any of them, with a baseline documented at zero — our public SEO scorecard posts the positions monthly and leaves the misses in. It is question one on this page, answered on ourselves, in advance.

Use this on us too

Five questions that break a fake claim

Print these. Ask them of every agency, consultant and lead vendor you talk to, including this one. A firm that can answer all five in a minute is telling the truth. A firm that gets uncomfortable at question one has told you everything you need.

Question 01

What was the baseline?

"We tripled their leads" is not an answer. Tripled from what to what? If the before-number does not exist, the claim was manufactured after the fact, and the person quoting it knows that. Watch for the pivot to a percentage when you ask for a count.

Question 02

What was the window, and does it include the bad months?

Ask for both endpoints and for the full period of the engagement. If the claim covers four months of an eighteen-month relationship, ask what happened in the other fourteen. A window chosen after the results are known is not a measurement, it is a selection.

Question 03

How was it attributed?

Ask how a closed customer got linked back to their work, and what happens to a buyer who saw an ad, forgot about it, and typed the company name into Google three weeks later. Every honest answer to this question contains the word "some". An answer with no uncertainty in it is a sales answer.

Question 04

Who was the client, and was it actually a client?

Plenty of case studies describe the agency's own business, a sister company, or a friend who never paid. That is not disqualifying as long as it is disclosed, and we disclose it: FreedInsure is ours. The question is whether they tell you before you ask or after you catch it.

Question 05

Can I call them?

The last question, and the one that ends most conversations. A reference who will take an unscheduled call from a stranger is worth more than every case study on a website, including this one. If the answer is a curated quote instead of a phone number, you have learned what the case study is worth.

Point these questions at your own numbers first.

The free revenue diagnosis is this methodology applied to your business: what your speed to lead actually is, what your close rate is when the denominator is honest, and what a customer really costs you once the fees and payroll are in the math. Written down, ranked by dollars, and yours to keep whether you hire anyone or not.

Get your free diagnosis

Ask us for the source of anything on this site. That is the test.