Algeria AgencyIndustries
Your sector is not on the list: what holds for everybody
Nineteen articles about nineteen different trades. Here are the eight things that turned out to be true in all of them.
This series contains nineteen articles written for nineteen trades, each built around a mechanism of its own: a chair-hour that perishes, a date that expires, an estimate that decides, a size that cannot be tried on.
If your activity is not among them, this article is yours. It does not try to replace a sector article — it has no means to — but to isolate what turned out to be true across all the others.
There is a reason to read it even if your trade is on the list: every section points back to the articles it was drawn from, which makes it a map of the series as well.
And there is one thing it will not do: give you a universal method. The eight points that follow are true everywhere because they are structural, and the specific work begins exactly where they stop.
Start by identifying what you actually sell
The first task, in every case encountered, was naming the unit of sale. It is almost never the one the business believes it is.
A salon does not sell treatments but chair-hours, which perish nightly. A function room does not sell a service but a date, which expires on the hour. A gym does not sell a membership but attendance, and a workshop does not sell a repair but an estimate.
That identification is not a stylistic exercise: it changes what has to be measured, what has to be published, and where the loss is. An owner tracking memberships when the problem is attendance is looking at a correct figure that does not describe their business.
The question to ask is simple: what, in my business, is destroyed if it is not sold today? If something is — an hour, a seat, a date, a capacity — then your trade is steered like perishable stock, whatever it is you make.
If nothing is, the question becomes: what is the event my customer can see happen? In file-based trades it is a deadline; in manufacturing it is a delivery; and that event is what carries your reputation.
Separate what your customer can verify
In nearly all of these trades the customer cannot judge the substance of the work. They cannot tell whether the engine was properly reassembled, whether the analysis was right, whether the part was needed.
So they judge something else, and they judge it very well: the time stated and kept, the reply given or not, the accuracy of what they were told to bring, and the absence of a gap between the announcement and the invoice.
The consequence is constant across sectors: quality decides the outcome and does not build the reputation, because it is not observable. What builds it is a series of organisational details everybody treats as administrative.
It is also why pages asserting quality work nowhere. "Serious", "reliable", "trustworthy" are written identically by those who are and those who are not, and a reader knows it.
What replaces assertion is verifiability: a written measurement, a part kept and shown, an hour kept, an exact list. None of those gestures is an argument, and that is precisely what makes them credible.
The gap between what was announced and what was delivered
This is the most universal mechanism in the whole series: disputes are almost always about a gap, and almost never about the absolute value of what was delivered.
An exceeded estimate, a missed deadline, an exclusion discovered, a size that does not match, an unannounced extra, a missing document: those are the same event conjugated across six trades. In every case the customer compares what they understood with what they got.
The fix is identical everywhere and it is free: write down in advance what is included, what is not, and what triggers a supplement. In none of the trades we covered does that writing run to more than a page.
The second move, equally transferable, is warning before the gap is noticed. A delay announced is information, a delay discovered is a fault — and the difference between the two is a two-line message.
The third is deciding in advance what you do when the unforeseen arrives: a threshold beyond which you stop and call, a cancellation scale, a substitution rule. Those are decisions taken calmly, because they will be applied under pressure.
The business listing, true for everybody
It is the one piece of advice identical in all nineteen articles: your business listing is consulted more than your website, it is often wrong, and correcting it is free.
The internet market observatory published by ARPCE counts, for the second quarter of 2025, some 59.10 million internet subscriptions in Algeria, of which 88.71% are mobile and 11.29% fixed.
That figure explains why. Your customers search for you standing up, on the move, usually in a hurry, and what they are after comes down to three things: are you open, where exactly are you, how do I reach you in one gesture.
The mistakes are the same everywhere: a holiday opening time never corrected, a map pin a hundred metres from the door, a number that is no longer current, a badly chosen category. None of them costs money to repair.
That is why nearly every article in this series ends with the same sentence: start there, it takes twenty minutes, and it removes more calls and wasted journeys than any rebuild.
- Mobile subscriptions88.71%
- Fixed subscriptions11.29%
ARPCE, internet market observatory, second quarter of 2025
What can be measured without tools, in any trade
None of the nineteen articles recommends measurement software, and that is not an oversight. The numbers that steer a small business fit in a notebook and take a minute per job to record.
Three of them transpose everywhere. The first is the time to a first reply to an incoming enquiry, in hours: it is decisive in events, in manufacturing, in professional practices, and it is entirely within your control.
The second is the conversion rate, measured by category rather than overall. An overall rate mixes different products; the same figure by family, by type of day or by zone identifies a cause.
The third is the reason for failure, asked for and recorded in one word. Twenty lines are enough, in every trade observed, for a dominant cause to appear — and it is nearly always different from the one the owner had been citing.
Those three measures share a property: they cost nothing, they move fast, and they say whether your problem is acquisition, conversion or execution. Those are three problems with opposite answers, and spending on the wrong one is the commonest mistake we met.
The figure you cannot have
In each of those nineteen articles there is at least one place where we write that we know of no datable figure for Algeria. That is not an editorial gap, it is a position, and it deserves stating once and for all.
Dated, checkable Algerian statistics are few. We use a handful across the whole series — the ARPCE observatory, the GIE Monétique annual balance sheet, DataReportal’s figures — and we name the publisher and the year every time.
For everything else — parcel refusal rates, settlement times, seasonality, the share of referrals, average prices — the figures in circulation are sales arguments with no year, no scope and no method.
The rule we apply is simple: when a figure cannot be dated, we do not quote it, and we say why. An article showing fewer numbers than another is not less researched; it is more honest about what it knows.
That rule has a useful consequence for you whatever your sector: when a supplier quotes you a market figure, ask for the publisher, the year and the scope. What they answer tells you more about the rest of their proposal than the figure itself.
What belongs to the business rather than to people
This problem appeared in trades with nothing in common: a gym and its star coach, a salon and its practitioner, a group practice, a building firm and its founder.
The shape is always the same. Somebody carries the communication for two years, everything is published under their name from their phone, then they leave — and they take the account, the audience, the number on display and sometimes the business listing.
The fix is administrative, it takes an hour, and it is done when the person arrives rather than when they leave: the domain name, the hosting, the accounts and the listing belong to the business, with a business email address.
Images have to be added to that. Photographs taken on your premises, with your equipment, of your customers, stay with the business, and that point has to be written down — it is the one producing the most unpleasant conversations at a departure.
And several people should be named publicly rather than one. A business whose entire communication shows an individual has built, without meaning to, the value of the competitor that individual will become.
Reviews, whatever the trade
Three observations repeated across every sector. The first is that reviews are written by a biased population: those something happened to, and almost never those for whom everything went smoothly.
The second is that the effective reply is short, factual and dated. It restates what was announced, what changed and when the person was told, then offers a direct channel. It does not argue technique and it does not justify itself.
The third is that in trades covered by confidentiality — health, banking, insurance, professional practices — that reply must additionally confirm nothing. You do not confirm that somebody is a client or a patient, whatever the temptation.
There is a fourth point, positive and invariably neglected: in every trade there is a moment when asking for a review is legitimate. It is the handover of the vehicle, the acceptance of the building work, the settled claim, the service completed with no gap.
That moment is the only one where your customer holds a complete and verifiable experience, and it is the one nearly everybody lets pass by asking for reviews at random, three weeks later, in a group message.
Payment, and where it changes something
Electronic payment is presented everywhere as modernisation, and that is nearly always the wrong reason to take an interest in it. Across the nineteen trades observed, it genuinely changes something in three specific cases.
The first is commitment: a deposit taken at the moment the customer decides turns an intention into a booking. That holds for an event date, for a salon slot, for a part ordered specially.
The second is renewal without a journey: an insurance instalment, a gym membership, a recurring service. The friction is not the price, it is the trip, and it loses customers who had no intention of leaving.
The third is the transfer of risk in distance selling: a prepaid order is almost never refused at the door, which interests the merchant and the carrier equally.
The direction of the market is dated: over one year the number of online merchants grew 26%, card transactions on the internet 38%, and the amount paid online 179%, while the card base grew only 9%. Read it as a trend rather than an instruction: if none of the three cases above applies to you, there is no hurry.
GIE Monétique, 2025 annual balance sheet
What does not transfer
This article needs a section for its own reverse, or it would be dishonest. The eight points above are true everywhere because they describe structures; they say nothing about what makes your trade your trade.
What does not transfer is first the cycle. A salon decides in an hour, a function room over a year, an industrial firm in six months. The same advice about response time produces effects of wholly different magnitude depending on which of the three you are.
Then the regulatory constraint, which is not a nuance but a change of kind. Three of the nineteen trades in this series can promise almost nothing, and for them half the usual advice is not ineffective but prohibited.
Then the mode of decision: impulse purchase, compared purchase, once-in-a-lifetime purchase, purchase by committee. Those are four different readers, and a page written for one works for none of the other three.
That is why we will not write a general method. The right way to use this article is as a list of questions to ask yourself, then to answer them with what you know about your sector and we do not.
What to check before signing, in any sector
Five questions turned out to be discriminating across every trade in this series, and they come before any discussion of price.
The first: ask them what your problem is. A supplier proposing a solution without having asked for a single figure from your operation is selling what they know how to do, not what you need.
The second: ask what they will refuse to write. Every trade in this series has a list of things not to publish — outcome promises, named comparisons, testimonials, unverifiable figures. A supplier with no list of refusals has not yet met the question.
The third: check ownership. Domain name, hosting, accounts, business listing, the number on display, photographs. All in the business’s name, with a business email address, reachable without going through them.
The fourth: ask who updates, and how often. A page correct today and wrong in eighteen months is a liability. And the fifth: require their monthly report to contain at least one number from your own operation — without it they are describing their work rather than your business.
What we do, and what we will refuse to do
This is the article in the series where it would be easiest to write generalities, and therefore the one where we have to be most precise about our limits.
What we will refuse: selling you a universal method. The eight points above are true everywhere because they are structural; they do not replace knowledge of your trade, and a supplier claiming otherwise is selling a template they will apply to everybody.
We will also refuse to quote a market figure we cannot date, including when that weakens a proposal. It is the rule running through all twenty articles in this series and the one we hold to most firmly.
A limit of competence, stated plainly: we do not know your sector better than you do. What we know how to do is ask the questions that worked in nineteen others, listen to the answers, and write what comes out — not explain your trade to you.
And what you should do without us this week, whatever your sector: correct your business listing — real hours, public holidays, pin on your door, number callable in one gesture — then record for a fortnight the reason for every piece of business lost, in one word. The first is free and takes twenty minutes; the second is free and will tell you whether you need us at all.
Frequently asked questions
My sector is not covered. Where do I start?
With the two free moves at the end of this article: correct your business listing, and record for a fortnight the reason for every piece of business lost, in one word. Together they will tell you whether your problem is acquisition, conversion or execution.
What is the one piece of advice that really holds for everybody?
The business listing. It is the only point identical in all nineteen articles in this series: it is consulted more than your website, it is often wrong, and correcting it costs nothing.
Why do you refuse to quote certain figures?
Because dated, checkable Algerian statistics are few. When a figure cannot be dated we do not quote it and we say why — and you should ask any supplier quoting you one for the publisher, the year and the scope.
Does every business need a website?
No, but every business needs to be verifiable: to exist, to say what it does and does not do, and to be reachable. In several trades in this series an accurate listing and a written list were worth more than a site.
Is online payment useful in my case?
It genuinely changes something in three cases: committing a customer at the moment they decide, allowing renewal without a journey, and removing the risk of a refusal at the door in distance selling. If none applies, there is no hurry.
How do I tell whether a supplier is serious?
Ask them what your problem is before they propose a solution, and what they will refuse to write. A supplier who has asked for no figure from your operation is selling what they know how to do, not what you need.
Where we come in
Eight points hold for nearly every trade; the ninth is yours, and it is written nowhere. That is the one that decides the order.
- We ask what your trade is before saying anything applicable.
- We separate what belongs to your organisation from what belongs on a page.
- We date every figure we quote, or we do not quote it.
Your sector is less familiar to us than to you: there is no universal method to sell you, and nobody holds one.
Read next
The first ninety days: what order to do it in
Everybody knows what to do. Almost nobody knows in what order — and the order is what decides the result.Why your website is slow — and what it costs you
Site speed is not measured on your desktop, and that is where the whole misunderstanding starts.A website does not break down, it goes out of date
Almost every website failure is silent: nothing stops, nothing alerts, and nobody notices before a customer does.
Let us talk about your project
A free audit, no commitment: we look at your online presence and tell you what is holding it back.