Seven stages, from understanding your business to a commercial system that runs without depending on any one person. Each stage has one job. We work through them in order, at your pace, and you leave every one of them with something useful whether or not we go further.
Before anyone recommends anything, we need to understand what you are actually trying to achieve and what is getting in the way. This stage is a conversation, not an assessment. Our only job here is to establish whether there is a real commercial issue worth working on — and to be honest with you if there isn't.
Understanding whether we are the right fit for each other serves us as much as it serves you. Charging for it would create pressure to find a problem, so we don't.
We ask about your growth ambition, what is frustrating you commercially, what it is costing, and what a better position would look like. Mostly we listen and write down what you say.
An organised articulation of something you have probably been describing loosely for a while — and a straight answer on whether this is worth taking further.
If there is something real here, we look at how growth actually works in your business. If there isn't, we say so plainly — that is a good outcome too, and it costs you nothing either way.
What is your biggest challenge or frustration with growth right now?
In your words — we will keep coming back to this.
What is that costing you?
Missed revenue, management time, wasted spend, delay, stalled growth — whichever of those is real for you.
If it continues, what are the consequences?
Commercially, operationally and personally.
What would the ideal position look like if this were solved?
This becomes the standard we hold the work to.
Why does this matter now, rather than a year ago or a year from now?
A structured conversation about how growth actually works in your business today — where opportunities come from, where they slow down, and what the numbers look like. Rough answers are genuinely fine. What a business cannot measure is as useful to us as what it can.
We are still establishing whether there is something here worth working on. Nothing becomes chargeable until we both agree there is, and until you have seen exactly what it would cost.
The symptom everyone can see is rarely the constraint that is actually limiting growth. "We need more leads" is sometimes exactly right — and just as often it is a conversion problem, an account-depth problem or an internal-response problem in disguise. Acting on the wrong diagnosis is expensive: marketing spend producing enquiries the business cannot convert, a sales hire into a role that was never defined, discounting to solve what was really a value-communication problem.
How do opportunities come to you today?
Referral, existing customers, enquiries, distributors, exhibitions, outbound, your own network.
Which customers or sectors drive most of the revenue?
And roughly what share sits with your top three.
Where do opportunities usually slow down or disappear?
As specific as you can be — between sample and trial, at quotation, at procurement, at technical approval.
How dependent is growth on you or one or two individuals?
This usually started as a strength. We are only interested in where it has become a bottleneck.
What have you already tried, and what happened?
Where does commercial activity feel least visible to you?
Estimates are welcome. Where something is not tracked, we simply note that — it tells us about visibility, which matters.
Roughly, most recent full year.
The ambition, and what it is based on.
New enquiries or opportunities entering, however you count them.
How many of those become customers. A ratio is fine.
Typical order or project. Note if a few large ones distort it.
Do customers buy again? A shape is enough: mostly one-off, top accounts reorder quarterly, roughly 70% of revenue is repeat.
The sales cycle. If it varies a lot, say so and give the range — that is useful in itself.
Everyone doing commercial work, including part-timers and the founder's own share.
A facilitated working session with your leadership team that establishes, with evidence, where growth in your business is actually constrained — and what the next ninety days should achieve. It is the point at which opinion becomes arithmetic.
This is the first stage that carries a fee. It is a fixed amount, agreed in writing before anything is booked, and you decide whether to go ahead knowing precisely what it is. There is no obligation beyond this session.
| Part | What you will do | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Grounding | Each person states their number-one commercial frustration, before any framework influences the answer. Where you see it differently, we capture that rather than resolve it — the difference is usually the most useful thing in the room. |
| 2 | The Four Growth Levers | We model your own numbers live: qualified opportunities, conversion, average order value and repeat business. You see how modest improvements across several of them compound, and which ones can realistically move in ninety days. |
| 3 | Commercial Foundations | Your team scores strategy, systems, capability, management and daily rhythm independently, then compares. Where the scores diverge, that gap is itself a finding. |
| 4 | Ownership | We map your real sales process step by step — including sampling, trials, approvals and procurement — and establish who owns each step and what shows it is complete. |
| 5 | Performance | Six dimensions of commercial performance — process, targeting, positioning, pricing, people and product — scored against clear benchmarks, with one improvement chosen rather than six. |
| 6 | Roadmap | Ninety-day milestones, the few actions that create the greatest movement, named owners, dates and the measures you will review. |
| 7 | Reflection | What became clear, and an honest decision on what happens next — including whether you run the plan yourselves. |
The people whose decisions or behaviours materially affect the commercial system. In a technical manufacturer that usually means the owner or MD, the commercial lead, the sales manager, a technical representative and operations. Four to seven works best — too many dilutes the conversation, too few produces a plan that absent colleagues later reject.
A short questionnaire, about twenty minutes, completed individually rather than as an agreed joint view. It means the session opens with substance instead of context-setting.
Nobody is being assessed. The purpose is to find where the commercial system is failing capable people. Almost every gap we find is structural.
The session stands on its own. If your team has the capability and capacity to run the resulting plan internally, that is a good outcome and we will say so.
Every fee is agreed in writing before the work it relates to begins. You will never receive an invoice for something you did not knowingly commit to.
Committing to this session commits you to nothing beyond it. If the plan it produces is one you would rather run yourselves, that is a legitimate and welcome outcome.
Anything ongoing has a defined scope, a defined term and a review every ninety days. No rolling commitment you have to extract yourself from.
Full day works best where several functions attend.
What the Diagnostic established, and what the next ninety days will achieve. Ranked, not listed — a plan is only useful if it tells you what to leave alone as well as what to do.
The written plan is the deliverable of the Diagnostic, not an addition to it. It is yours to act on with or without us — and if your team can run it internally, we will say so.
| # | Constraint | What it is costing, and the evidence |
|---|
Revenue is not one problem. It is a combination of how many of the right opportunities enter, how many progress, how much value each one carries, and how much a customer is worth over time. Improving several of them modestly usually beats a heroic effort on one — because they multiply rather than add.
Real opportunities, not every enquiry.
What share of those become customers.
Numbers only, no commas or currency symbol.
Leave at 1 if customers typically buy once.
This is a sensitivity model, not a forecast — it shows how revenue responds when the underlying variables move. The figures are yours, and the improvements are the ones your team judged realistic.
What revenue should look like at day 90.
How many real opportunities should exist, and at what stage.
Wins, approvals or specifications actually secured.
What should be happening consistently, every week, without being chased.
Five or fewer. Every one with a named person and a date, and every one traceable back to a constraint above.
| Action | Owner | By when | Constraint it addresses | Status |
|---|
The first ninety days, where the plan becomes a working commercial operating model. Not software switched on — agreed definitions, stages that reflect how your customers really buy, named ownership for every step, a prioritised account list with plans behind it, response standards that are measured, and a weekly rhythm that produces decisions rather than updates.
Proposed only after the plan exists, scoped to what the plan actually requires rather than to a standard package, and agreed in writing before any work begins.
Automation magnifies whatever has been designed. If qualification is vague, automation accelerates vague qualification. If stages have no exit criteria, a dashboard simply gives a cleaner view of inconsistent data. So the definitions come first, and the system is configured to match — not the other way round.
In technical markets with sampling, trials and approvals, ninety days is long enough to move the early indicators — access to decision-makers, qualified opportunities, stage progression, response times — and rarely long enough to move revenue. We set the ninety-day milestones against those early measures and expect revenue in the quarters that follow. We would rather set that expectation now than explain it at the review.
This separation is deliberate. Commercial systems become fragile when the person with the most expensive judgement is also expected to do every repeatable task — and you would stop getting the thing you are paying for.
Most opportunities do not fail because the first conversation was poor. They fail because follow-up was inconsistent, internal response was slow, ownership was unclear, or nobody reviewed the blocker in time. Rhythm is what prevents drift — and it should feel like control, not bureaucracy.
The weekly, monthly and quarterly rhythm is covered by the agreed monthly fee. Reporting and reviews are never charged as extras.
What moved, what is stuck, what evidence changed our view, what decision is needed from you, and what happens in the next seven days — with named owners.
Plus a written update you can forward without editing.
Patterns rather than events: pipeline quality, where conversion leaks, account development, why we win and lose, what the market response is telling us, and the next thirty-day improvement.
Direction. What materially changed, which markets and accounts proved strongest, what to continue, stop and expand, and what the next ninety days should achieve.
Keep it short. Everyone on this list is expected to act on it.
A small, stable set of measures, reviewed the same way every week. Early indicators move first; the outcomes follow.
| Measure | Where we started | Where we are | Comment |
|---|
Emails sent, calls made, meetings held. Those are effort, not progress. You will get movement, risk and the decisions we need from you — which is the only thing a leadership team can actually act on.
Continuous improvement does not mean continuous change. Stable execution is what creates the evidence to learn from — so we change the smallest meaningful thing, observe, then keep it or reverse it. Only once something is proved does it get extended.
Reviewed every ninety days — including an honest view on whether the level of support should go up, stay as it is, or come down.
You should end up with more than introductions: clearer priorities, stronger account focus, better opportunity discipline, visibility you trust, a leadership rhythm that holds, and more confidence in how growth is managed.
The objective is commercial capability you keep — not dependency on us. If the right answer becomes less support rather than more, we will tell you.