Business Performance Diagnostic
“Performance isn’t what it should be. We don’t agree on why, and every supplier who walks in recommends their own speciality.”
- Margin and mix
- Market reality
- Ranked constraints
Business performance and development consulting
Turnover is up. Profit isn’t. Nobody agrees why.
Most performance problems get diagnosed by whoever is selling the solution. We start with your numbers and your market, name the real constraint, and stay until the change is running.
Recognise any of this
The business is working harder than it used to. It isn’t paying more.
None of these are unusual. What is unusual is knowing which one you actually have before you spend money on the answer.
Turnover is up. Profit is flat.
The growth is being absorbed somewhere between the sale and the bank.
Marketing spend keeps rising. Performance doesn’t move.
Activity is being measured. Contribution is not.
Your best-selling line may not be your best business.
Volume and margin rarely sit in the same place, and nobody has checked.
Prices were set years ago and adjusted by habit.
Value delivered and value captured have quietly drifted apart.
You grew, then it stopped.
The route that built the business has run out, and no next one exists yet.
Everything still runs through you.
Performance is capped by one person’s calendar, not by the market.
Every supplier recommends their own speciality.
Four plausible answers, and no way to rank them by what they are worth.
The plan exists. Nothing has moved.
A decision was made but never converted into roles, sequence and measurement.
Each of these needs a different intervention, and several get worse if you guess. Knowing which one you have is the problem worth solving first.
How we read a business
Numbers, then market, then decision, then execution.
Four movements, always in this order. The order is the product — most suppliers start at the fourth and assume the first three were done.
What do the economics actually say?
- Margin and contribution by product, service, customer and segment
- Pricing, discounting behaviour and price realisation
- Cost to serve, and where it concentrates
- Acquisition economics, where they are measurable
Select a movement to see what it reads and what it produces.
Where most engagements start
The Business Performance Diagnostic.
Fixed scope, fixed price, fixed duration. It answers one question properly, instead of committing you to an open-ended engagement before anyone has evidence.
- 01We read the economics — margin, mix, pricing, cost to serve, customer and segment profitability.
- 02We read those against the market, the proposition, the sales process and the operating model.
- 03We interview the people who actually run the commercial side of the business.
- 04We rank what we find by what it is worth, and say what we are deliberately deferring.
You get a short written diagnosis, a ranked shortlist of constraints with an indicative value against each, and a costed recommendation on what to do next — including, where it is the honest answer, that you should do nothing, or something that earns us no further fee.
Scope and price are set against your business, in the consultation. We do not publish a number that would be wrong for most people reading this page.
How we work
Five stages, published in full before you buy any of it.
No gating and no email capture. If you want to run this yourself, the method is here to be used — giving it away is rather the point.
01
Picture
What do the economics of this business actually say, and what does its market actually allow?
02
Focus
Where is value or performance being constrained, and what is that constraint worth?
03
Direction
What has to change, why, in what order, and what is it worth doing?
04
Build
How does that change become operational in this business?
05
Autonomy
Can the client run, measure and improve this without us?
Each stage commits more than the last. Nothing is decided before the evidence supports it.
What you can buy
Four engagements.
An answer, a plan, a build, and continuing judgement. Most companies start with the first and stop whenever it stops being worth it.
Strategy & Development Blueprint
“We know what the constraint is. We don’t yet know what to do about it, what it’s worth, or what it will take.”
- Decided direction
- Business case
- Sequence
Execution Programme
“We have the decision. Nothing has changed, because nobody owns making it happen and the suppliers are pulling in different directions.”
- One direction
- Specialist orchestration
- Measured handover
Embedded Performance Advisory
“We need senior judgement available continuously — someone who already knows our numbers and our market and can be in the decisions as they happen.”
- Defined cadence
- Stated term
- Decisions tested early
What we look at
Five lenses. None of them is a product.
Which ones a piece of work uses is decided by the diagnosis, not by choosing from a list. They are published so the breadth behind a two-person firm is visible.
- 01Business Economics & Performance
- 02Market, Strategy & Positioning
- 03Commercial, Sales & Marketing
- 04Operating Model & Organisation
- 05Execution & Specialist Delivery
Why this is different
The person who scopes the work does the work.
We have no client logos, no metrics and no awards to argue with. Everything below is structural — true because of how the firm is built, not because of what it has achieved.
Diagnosis before prescription
We do not sell a channel, so we are structurally able to conclude that the answer is pricing, portfolio, organisation — or nothing at all.
Economics read against market
The answer usually lives in the gap between what an accountant can see and what an agency can see. We work in that gap deliberately.
Senior, and directly involved
No delivery layer and no account manager. Your counterpart is a principal, from the first email to the handover.
Built to end
Handover is a stage with artefacts and a date. Success is what you can do after we leave, not how long we stay.
What “financial” means here, and what it does not
You think we’re a marketing agency.
Marketing is one possible answer among several, chosen only when the evidence points there. We don’t buy media, run ad accounts or produce creative — specialists do that, to our brief.
You think we’re accountants, or a fractional CFO.
We use your numbers as evidence for a commercial decision. We don’t provide bookkeeping, accounting, tax, statutory reporting, audit or regulated financial advice, and we work alongside your accountant.
You think this ends with a recommendation.
Two of our four engagements exist entirely after the recommendation. The document is the halfway point, not the deliverable.
Who you deal with
Two people, and the specialists we bring to your problem.
There is no layer between you and the people doing the thinking. When execution needs craft, we bring specialists we have chosen, brief them ourselves, and stay accountable for the result.
- Michael SpinazziCEOCommercial strategy, positioning, and the direction an engagement takes.
- Raynald OkantaCFOBusiness economics, margin, and the numbers behind a business case.
Ventures
We invest and build, not only advise.
Alongside the advisory work we hold ventures of our own. It is why the advice is written by people carrying commercial risk rather than commenting on it.
- LAMPO Technologies
- Gentlemen’s Masterclass
Tell us what isn’t performing.
Request a consultation45 minutes with a principal. No deck, no pitch. If we’re not the right answer, we’ll say so.