BEFORE ANYTHING GETS BUILT
THE FOUR READINGS
Every company believes something about itself. A reading tests whether the evidence agrees. There are four, and what separates them is who does the reading.
Why there are four
A reading is not a view of your market or an opinion on your strategy. It tests one thing: whether the evidence inside your company supports what the company believes about itself, against the four conditions that decide whether growth holds. Durability, repeatability, compounding and absorbable pace.
All four readings run on that same standard. What changes is who does the reading, and that changes the question it can answer. You can read yourself. We can read your records. Your executive team can read itself, with us holding the method. Or we can read the company for whoever is putting capital in. They are not interchangeable and a heavier one is not always the better one.
The Scaling Readiness Check
You read yourself. Free.
Twelve questions, ten minutes, scored as you go, with one of three verdicts at the end: Scale Up, First Optimise or Scale Back. It reads no records, so it can only be as good as your own picture of the company. That is what makes it useful. It shows you how much of your confidence rests on evidence you could actually produce, before you spend anything finding out.
The Scaling Verification
We read your records. £9,500 plus VAT.
For a chief executive or board with a dated decision ahead. Your records are assessed against a fixed written standard and you receive a written Verdict Note seven working days after your evidence is complete. Each of the four conditions gets a finding in plain words, every material gap is named, and anywhere the records contradict the answers is stated rather than softened.
The full fee credits against the initial fee of a Scaling Baseline whose letter is signed within ninety days of your Verdict Note.
The Scaling Baseline
Your executive team reads itself. £50,000 plus VAT.
This is not a bigger Verification. It answers a different question: whether your leaders are running the company from one picture or several. One person reading records cannot settle that, and no report can.
Two days in the room, in person, after three weeks of private pre-reads, individual calls and a fact layer from your finance lead. Day one closes the gap between what each of your leaders privately believes. Day two turns the agreed picture into a baseline: the position in the room’s own words, up to twelve measurable marks with today’s values and named owners, the decisions the divergence exposed, and each executive’s commitments. Twelve is a ceiling, so that a baseline stays a baseline and does not become a dashboard. The re-measure date is booked before anyone leaves.
It renders no verdict, no score, no ranking and no assessment of any person. Your team writes the baseline; we hold the method and the evidence discipline. You leave holding your own words. A ninety-minute session follows at day thirty to forty-five, and a re-measure is a priced option at £25,000 plus VAT, ten to fourteen months on.
The Scaling Diagnostic
We read the company, for whoever is putting capital in.
The heaviest reading, bought by sponsors and boards around an event: a transaction, a company behind its plan, a growth case that has to be underwritten. It produces a verdict and a plan in causal order, and the verdict is capable of saying no.
If you are a chief executive reading this, you are hearing about it from us before you hear about it from your sponsor. That is on purpose, and it is how we would want it done to us.
What none of them do
No reading builds anything. A reading tells you what is true and what has to change; the work itself is the Build, and it is delivered by specialist partners rather than by us. Nothing is ever held back from a reading in order to create a next sale.
Which one
No decision in front of you? Take the Check. It is free and it takes ten minutes.
A dated decision, and records your systems can produce? The Verification.
Your leaders describing different companies? The Baseline.
Capital riding on the answer? The Diagnostic.
Not sure? Tell us the decision and its date. We will tell you which reading fits, including when the answer is none of them.
Thirty minutes. Three questions. A reply within one working day.