Every business owner likes to believe their customers would gladly refer them to others, but most never stop to ask a critical question:

How many referrals should I actually be getting?

The answer isn’t vague or subjective, it’s a simple numbers game.

The average person knows at least 25 people well enough to invite to a wedding or a funeral. Not casual acquaintances. Not social media “friends.” These are real relationships. People they interact with, trust, and value.

Which means every single customer who walks through your door is capable of referring at least 25 people to you. Are they?

Most businesses, if they’re being honest, would say no.

If you have 100 customers, and only 20 have ever referred—and only 10 have done it more than once—you have a massive missed opportunity staring you in the face. And yet, you deliver the same great service to all 100. You go above and beyond. You take care of them.

So why are only 10% or 20% referring when they all could be?

Because referrals don’t happen just because you deserve them.

They happen because you engineer them.

Most business owners assume referrals are the customer’s responsibility, that if they’re happy enough, they should send people your way.

But that’s not how it works.

The reality is, their responsibility ends the moment they pay you.

It’s your responsibility to ensure they send referrals by making it easy, automatic, and rewarding. If you don’t take full control of the referral process, you will always underperform.

Most business owners have no idea how many referrals they actually generate per customer because they’ve never measured it. They assume referrals “just happen.”

But if you ask the top 1% in any industry what their referral numbers are, they’ll tell you without hesitation. They know how many referrals they get per customer, which customers refer the most, and which ones never refer at all—plus why.

The best businesses know their numbers. The rest guess, hope, and assume.

If you’re not tracking and improving your referral performance, you’re leaving a massive amount of money on the table.

Because here’s the reality: when you acquired your last customer, you didn’t just buy them.

You bought their entire network.

You already paid for the opportunity to reach 25+ more people through them. But until you take action, that opportunity is sitting there wasted.

If you’re getting less than one referral per customer, you’re not even hitting the baseline.

If you’re not tracking how many referrals you get per customer, you have no way to improve.

If you don’t have a structured, systematic approach to making referrals easy and rewarding, you’re relying on random chance to grow your business.

None of that is good enough.