The Problem Nobody Can Name
You sit down with your leadership team—or maybe it's just you and a whiteboard—and try to figure out why growth feels so hard. Marketing says leads are coming in. Sales says they're closing. Operations says they're delivering. And yet: customers aren't sticking around, cash flow is unpredictable, and every project still feels like it's being figured out for the first time.
Everyone has a different explanation. Everyone's pointing at a different problem.
The root cause is almost always the same: there's no shared language for the work. No common vocabulary across departments—or across your own thinking—for describing where things happen, where they break down, or where the opportunity is hiding.
Without that language, every leadership conversation requires three paragraphs of context. Every status update is an essay. Every strategy session drifts because nobody is describing the business the same way.
The AAAERRR framework—pronounced "Air"—exists to solve this. It gives your business the ability to breathe.
Why "Air"?
The pronunciation isn't accidental. We're giving air to the challenges that owners and operators often have a hard time identifying—or articulating.
Think about the last time you tried to explain a persistent business problem to a partner, a board member, or a key hire. Maybe you talked around it for ten minutes. Maybe you described a handful of symptoms and hoped they'd see the pattern. Maybe you said "I don't know, things just aren't working" and watched the room go quiet.
That's suffocation. Your business can't breathe because you can't name what's choking it.
AAAERRR gives you oxygen. When you can say "we have an Activation problem—people are signing up but we're not aligning expectations before we commit resources"—you've given air to something that was previously just a vague sense of unease. And once it has a name, it has a solution.
One Framework, Two Lenses
Here's what makes AAAERRR different from every other business framework that's crossed your desk: it works from both directions simultaneously.
As an owner or operator, you live at the intersection of two perspectives that need to be in alignment. The internal perspective—how your organization defines, creates, and captures value—and the external perspective—how your customer experiences that value. Most frameworks only address one side. AAAERRR speaks to both.
Looking Inward
The Value Stream
Internally, AAAERRR maps the sequence of work by which your organization defines, creates, and is paid for the value it produces.
This is the view from behind the curtain—the one your ops team, your department heads, and your GMs live in every day. The workflows, the handoffs, the stages of production. Where does work enter? How does it flow? Where does it get stuck? Where does value get created, and where does it get lost?
Looking Outward
The Customer Experience
Externally, AAAERRR maps the path your customer travels as they experience your business from first impression to lasting advocacy.
This is how your customer sees the business. It's the experiential reality—the touchpoints, the moments of truth, the feelings at each stage. Where do they feel welcomed? Where do they feel confused? Where do they feel compelled to tell someone about you?
The power of AAAERRR is in holding both lenses at once. Because when you look at a stage like Activation from only the internal perspective, it's about contracts and kickoff procedures. But when you look at it from the customer's perspective, it's about confidence—do they feel certain they've made the right choice? Do they know what happens next?
When both perspectives are aligned, work flows and customers feel it. When they're misaligned, you get internal efficiency that produces a terrible customer experience—or delighted customers served by a team in chaos. Neither is sustainable—a reality that the convergence of two traditions helps us see more clearly.
The Funnel and the Flywheel
There's a natural structural break in AAAERRR that reveals something important about how your business actually works.
The first three stages—Awareness, Acquisition, Activation—are the funnel. They get customers in. The last four—Engagement, Retention, Revenue, Referral—are the flywheel. They determine what happens next.
AAA → The Funnel
Awareness → Acquisition → Activation
The funnel is linear by nature. Someone becomes aware of you, decides to engage further, and commits. Every new customer passes through this sequence. The goal of a great funnel is to make this journey as clear, honest, and efficient as possible—for both sides.
ERRR → The Flywheel
Engagement → Retention → Revenue → Referral
The flywheel is cyclical by nature. Great engagement builds retention. Retention justifies revenue. Revenue funds the capacity to deliver even better engagement. And referral? Referral feeds right back into Awareness—spinning the entire system without you having to push.
This distinction matters more than it seems.
Businesses that only focus on the funnel are on a treadmill. They're constantly filling the top, constantly acquiring, constantly spending energy getting new customers in the door—because nothing on the other side is spinning. No retention. No referral. Just a leaky bucket and a marketing budget that never stops growing.
Businesses that build a strong flywheel? The funnel still matters—but it gets easier over time. Referrals generate awareness. Retention reduces acquisition costs. Revenue becomes more predictable. The flywheel compounds.
Even One-Shot Deals Have a Flywheel
A common pushback I hear from owners and GMs is: "My business is project-based. There's no subscription. No recurring revenue. How does a flywheel apply to me?" (Game theory explains why this distinction matters less than you think.)
It applies more than you think.
Even in a single-project business—a home renovation, a wedding photography package, a consulting engagement—the quality of your ERRR experience determines whether you get retention and referral or reset.
A great Engagement experience that flows into genuine Retention (the customer feels supported, confident, cared for after delivery) leads to Revenue that feels fair and Referral that's organic. That customer tells three friends. Those three friends enter your funnel already warm. Your Acquisition costs drop. Your Activation gets easier because there's trust before you've even had a conversation.
A poor ERRR experience? You're filling the funnel from scratch, every single time. No referrals feeding Awareness. No retention reducing Acquisition effort. Just an endless grind of finding new customers to replace the ones who never came back—or worse, the ones who told their friends to stay away. If you're designing recurring revenue, the flywheel isn't optional—it's the entire business model.
Going Deeper: Diagnosing Pain Points
Here's where the Funnel/Flywheel structure combined with the dual lens becomes a diagnostic tool. When you break AAAERRR into its two halves and look at each stage from both perspectives, you start to see problems you couldn't see before.
These are the kinds of conversations I have with founders, GMs, and operators every week. See if any of them sound familiar.
Funnel Pain: "We get plenty of leads but nothing converts."
Internal lens (Value Stream): Your Awareness is working—marketing is generating demand. But your Acquisition stage has no qualification criteria. Every lead gets the same treatment regardless of fit. Your team wastes time on prospects that were never going to close, and qualified ones wait too long and go elsewhere.
External lens (Customer Experience): The customer felt attracted by your message but confused by the next step. They filled out a form and heard nothing for a week. Or they got a generic response that didn't acknowledge their specific situation. The experience didn't match the promise that created the Awareness in the first place.
Flywheel Pain: "We do great work but clients never come back."
Internal lens (Value Stream): Your Engagement stage is strong—the work itself is excellent. But Retention doesn't exist as a defined stage. Once the project is delivered, there's no follow-up system, no check-in, no mechanism for maintaining the relationship. The team moves on to the next project and the customer fades into a spreadsheet.
External lens (Customer Experience): The customer loved the work. But after delivery, they felt abandoned. No one asked if things were working. No one checked in after 30 days. When they needed something else six months later, they didn't think to call you—because you disappeared.
Transition Pain: "Projects always start messy."
Internal lens (Value Stream): There's a gap between Activation and Engagement—a cross-functional handoff that nobody owns. A contract gets signed and then... what? The handoff from sales to operations is improvised every time. Requirements aren't documented in a way the delivery team can use. Your people start work without knowing what "done" looks like. As the owner or GM, you end up bridging that gap yourself—every time.
External lens (Customer Experience): The customer had a great sales experience. Then they met the delivery team and had to re-explain everything. The confidence they built during Activation evaporated in the first week of Engagement. They're now wondering if they made the right choice.
Notice the pattern. The internal and external lenses often reveal different aspects of the same problem. The value stream shows you the operational breakdown. The customer experience shows you the emotional consequence. You need both to truly understand what's happening—and to design a solution that actually works. For a stage-by-stage diagnostic that walks you through the symptoms at each stage, that's where to go next.
How to Apply This Today
You don't need a six-month initiative to start using AAAERRR. You need a whiteboard, your leadership team (or your direct reports, or just yourself on a Sunday morning), and an honest conversation. Here's how to begin.
Start by naming your stages.
Walk through the seven stages and describe—in your own words—what each one looks like in your business today. Not what you wish it looked like. What actually happens. How does someone become Aware of you? What does Acquisition look like—is it a phone call, a form submission, a referral from a friend? What triggers Activation—a signed contract, a deposit, a handshake? Be specific. Be honest. If a stage doesn't really exist yet, say so. That's useful information.
Look at each stage through both lenses.
For each stage, ask two questions. First: "What does my team do here?" That's the value stream—the internal view. Second: "What does my customer experience here?" That's the customer experience—the external view. Write both answers down, side by side. Where they align, you have a working stage. Where they diverge, you've found a problem worth solving.
Find the bottleneck.
Look at your seven stages and ask: where does the most friction live? Where do things slow down, fall apart, or require heroic intervention—usually yours? That's your constraint—and it's where your attention should go first. In almost every organization I've worked with, there's one stage that's quietly strangling everything downstream. Name it. That's progress.
Assess your flywheel.
Ask yourself: is ERRR spinning, or am I filling the funnel from zero every time? If referrals aren't generating new Awareness, if past customers aren't returning, if revenue is unpredictable—your flywheel isn't turning. The fix almost always lives in Engagement or Retention. The delivery experience or the post-delivery relationship (or both) need deliberate attention.
A Shared Language Changes Everything
There's a moment in every engagement I have with an owner or operator where the vocabulary clicks. They stop describing problems in essays and start naming them in a word. More importantly, their team starts using the same words—and suddenly, leadership meetings get shorter, cross-functional alignment gets easier, and the real issues surface faster.
"Our Activation-to-Engagement handoff is broken—customers are re-explaining their needs to the delivery team."
"We're strong in Engagement but we have no Retention stage at all. People love the work, but we disappear after delivery."
"Our flywheel isn't spinning. We're 100% funnel-dependent."
Each of those sentences takes five seconds to say and an entire team immediately understands what it means. Compare that to the twenty-minute explanation you'd need without the vocabulary.
That's what a shared language does. It compresses complexity into clarity. It makes the invisible visible. It gives every level of your organization—from the front line to the C-suite—permission to point at something and say "this is where the problem is" without needing three meetings of context to get there.
And once the problem has a name—once it has air—it becomes solvable.
You can't improve what you can't name. AAAERRR gives you the names. The dual lens gives you the perspective. And the Funnel/Flywheel structure tells you where to look first.
That's when the real work—the deliberate work—begins.
Give your business air.
Name the stages. See them from both sides. Find the constraint. Design the fix.
Further Reading
- On the AAAERRR framework: For the full breakdown of the seven stages, funnel/flywheel structure, and the evolution from Pirate Metrics, read The 7 Stages Every Customer Goes Through—That Most Businesses Can't Name.
- On value stream thinking: Rother, M. & Shook, J. (1999). Learning to See: Value Stream Mapping. Lean Enterprise Institute. The foundational text on understanding how value flows through organizations.
- On customer experience design: Kalbach, J. (2016). Mapping Experiences. O'Reilly Media. A practical guide to understanding interactions from both organizational and customer perspectives.
- On the complete methodology: For the full framework on designing deliberate systems, Deliberate Work covers the methodology in depth. Get on the early access list.