Most companies improve the part that is easiest to improve, not the part that is holding everything else back. The two are rarely the same. This page explains how we tell them apart, what counts as evidence, and exactly what you end up holding.
Every company has all six, whether or not anyone designed them. Most were assembled over years by different people solving different problems, which is why the seams between them are where the money goes.
Every channel that brings you demand — the ones you pay for and the ones you don't. Referrals, repeat buyers, the sign on the truck, the listing nobody has updated in two years, and whatever an agency is running on your behalf.
Four channels running, one of them producing, and nobody able to say which. Spend and revenue both rising, with no one sure which one caused the other.
Everything between an inquiry arriving and money changing hands: how fast someone responds, who owns the follow-up, how quotes go out, and what happens at the handoff between whoever markets and whoever sells.
Inquiries that waited four days. A voicemail box nobody owns. Quotes sent and never chased. The company is paying full price for demand and losing it after it arrives.
Repeat business, renewals, and the reasons people stop. Includes the accounts that never formally left — they just stopped calling, and no report has a line for that.
New customers every month and flat revenue. Nobody can list the accounts lost last year, or say why they went.
What gets counted, who counts it, and whether any of it can be traced back to an invoice, a record or a system you can open yourself.
A monthly report full of numbers, none of which can be checked against anything. Decisions get made on it anyway, because there is nothing else on the table.
What has been tested, what it showed, what was kept and what was quietly dropped. Most companies have tried plenty and kept almost none of the learning.
The same idea tried twice in three years, because nobody recorded how the first attempt went or who decided to stop.
Who decides what to spend, on what evidence, and how often that decision is revisited with something other than the vendor's own report.
A retainer that renews every year because cancelling feels riskier than continuing. The decision is never made — it is only ever deferred.
The best advertising in your market is worth nothing if nobody answers the phone. Better follow-up is worth nothing if the people calling were never going to buy. And nothing you improve matters for long if you cannot tell afterwards whether it worked.
The parts are not independent. They run in sequence, and each one sets a ceiling on the ones after it.
In this illustration the second part is the constraint. Doubling the spend on the first only sends more demand into it. Companies lose years improving parts that were never the problem — usually the parts that are easiest to improve, or the ones a vendor was already being paid to work on. Finding which part is actually capping the others, with evidence rather than opinion, is the point of the whole engagement.
A diagnosis you cannot check is just a stronger opinion. Everything below exists so that you can disagree with a conclusion and see exactly which piece of evidence to argue with.
Every company is assessed against the same questions, with the same criteria and the same weighting. The result does not depend on who ran the engagement or how the conversation went that week. Two companies with the same evidence get the same reading.
Where a figure rests on an estimate, the estimate is printed beside it, not buried in a model. If you think an assumption is wrong, you can change it and recalculate yourself. That is deliberate — it is your business, and your judgement about it is usually better than ours.
If we compare your figures to anything outside your business, we say where that comparison comes from and who published it. We do not cite a private database of our own, because a benchmark you cannot look up is not a benchmark.
Software helps with the analysis and the drafting, the way it does in any modern professional firm. Every finding is verified by hand and traced to a source before it reaches you, and one named person signs the work.
The difference between an audit of your business and a summary of someone's opinion about it is where the material came from.
The order is not decorative. The number you can verify comes first, so that everything after it is read against something solid rather than the other way round.
What you actually paid for each new customer over the last year, reconstructed from your own books with the arithmetic shown. No projection or estimate appears anywhere before this page.
Where each one stands, what it is doing well, and where it is leaking — with the specific evidence behind each judgement and where that evidence came from.
Which part is capping the other five, what it is costing you over a year, and every assumption behind that figure written out so you can argue with it and recalculate.
What needs to exist, what it needs to do, and how you will know it is working. Written to be handed to whoever builds it — your team, your current vendor, or a new one.
What to do first, second and third, sized for the people you already have. No new hires assumed, no new platform required. If something genuinely cannot be done in-house, we say so and tell you what to ask for.
The document arrives before the session so you read it without anyone talking over it. Then sixty minutes to go through it, and your questions stay open by email for a week afterwards.
A firm that also builds the fix has a reason to find the fix it is best at building. We specify what your growth system should be; your own team or your existing vendors build it. If you ask us to build it, the answer is no — and we will tell you what to ask whoever does, and how to check the work afterwards.
Read the full standards →Bring your last marketing invoice. We'll tell you whether there is a system question worth answering — and if there isn't, we'll say so.