One standard, measured across eight areas: the numbers, the commercial management, and how much still depends on you. The work is bringing your own business up to it, so it holds without you and, if you ever sell, it is already there. The same standard is what I check when someone is buying one.
Run on evidence, not memory. Not dependent on one person. Worth having whether you ever sell or not. That is a quality standard, and the eight areas are the marks it is measured against.
A diagnostic is a service you buy once. A standard is a benchmark, and a benchmark is something you want to pass. The read tells you how close you are. The work closes the gap.
One structured pass across the eight areas that decide what the business is worth and how much of it still runs through you. It is built from documents, not from a questionnaire you fill in about yourself.
Your numbers stay under a mutual non-disclosure agreement, and the engagement ends when the report is delivered. There is no retainer and nothing rolls on.
Most of my work is with owners on their own business, so that is what this page is about. But if you are looking at an acquisition rather than your own company, the same standard applies to theirs, in three grades from a public-record screen through to verified earnings. Checking a business before you buy it →
The diagnostic buys the read and the plan, and it ends there. Nothing rolls on and nothing is bundled. But owners usually ask what fixing it actually looks like, so here it is. You would only ever take the lines your own plan calls for, scoped and priced separately, and only if you want them.
Scoped from your plan and priced before anything starts. Fractional, for as long as it is useful, with no open-ended retainer. It is built so your people keep the machine at the end. See how the work runs.
Eight areas get scored because someone has actually worked in all eight. Not studied them, implemented them, and lived with the consequences afterwards. That is the difference between a report that lists problems and one that knows which problem is causing the others.
Subsea engineering. Led a £1.2m qualification programme as client-facing lead, commissioned a multi-million-pound test facility, and established another overseas.
Took a loss-making business, bought out of distress, to roughly £100k of profit in about five months. The case study.
Built the sales and marketing strategy for an engineering consultancy and opened a nuclear and oil-and-gas pipeline. Later led market entry into hydrogen, sustainable fuels and major rail infrastructure.
Implemented document control, project controls, planning, permits and a bespoke change-management system across a multi-billion-pound programme, plus reporting dashboards and AI governance. The case study.
Ran post-acquisition integration when one engineering group was bought by another, and has since done the same work for owner-led businesses. The case study.
Full profit-and-loss ownership of a property business with £350k of investor funding raised. Built daily cashflow and monthly reporting for a multi-brand group, from a standing start. The case study.
The person who can read a set of accounts, name the constraint, and then go and build the fix is rarer than any CV makes it look.
None of this is a framework bought off a shelf. The method is the small-business version of a system built for a multi-billion-pound engineering programme: a change-management spine, document control, a coding structure, and reporting that told the truth early enough to act on. It has a serial number on it.
Which is also why the honest answer sometimes is that you do not need this. On one engagement the right advice was to stop investing and close the business. That is a case study too.
Being straight about the boundary is the point. A read that overstates what it can see is worth less than one that marks its own gaps.
Take the free Ratio Check, or book fifteen minutes. If the honest answer is that none of this would help you, I will say so on the call.