About
A fixed reference for business support.
Business support has never had one. Every programme measures differently, so nothing can be set against anything else, and the sector argues from narrative because it’s nothing else to argue from. A common instrument, published and unchanging, is the smallest thing that fixes that.
The Growth Score is published and maintained by Closing Foundry Ltd, registered in England and Wales, company number 14629519.
It began as an instrument built for Scottish Enterprise, to answer a question a development agency could not otherwise answer: is this a useful way to make support routing more consistent, more scalable and easier to justify? Everything since has been an extension of that.
The instrument is also licensed to partner organisations who deliver it under their own brand. Every one of them runs the same published method, at a stated version, and declares it.
Who builds and maintains it
Operators who have done the job the instrument measures.
A measure of commercial capability written by people who had never carried a number would be a questionnaire. This one was written from practice, and the judgement inside the sixteen cells is theirs.
Charles Talbot
Founder
Built the instrument and owns the method. Twenty five years selling, and the shift from founder heroics to a repeatable motion: stage exits, qualification, deal control and the operating rhythm behind forecast accuracy. Writes the specification and the version record.
Douglas Mancini
Senior Operating Partner
Enterprise go-to-market turnaround across UKI and EMEA. Rebuilds teams and installs pipeline-to-forecast rigour. Shapes the Closing and Control side of the diagnosis, where the cause is process rather than proposition.
Laurie Mascott
Senior Operating Partner
Data platforms, knowledge management and new market entry across EMEA, USA and APAC. Works with companies building a first repeatable motion, which is what the pre-revenue and early-revenue levels are calibrated against.
Joao Pedro Moniz Barreto
Operating Partner
Twelve years as sole EMEA lead for a US DevOps platform, selling to CIOs, engineering leaders and compliance functions in regulated industries, with ninety per cent retention over a decade. Handles technical and assurance reviews, the slowest part of any institutional deployment.
The bench
Specialists, by problem
Beyond the core operators, people across US go-to-market, marketing, customer success, services, fintech, enterprise sales and market expansion. Nobody is put on every engagement. The team is built around the problem.
The conflict, disclosed rather than discovered.
Closing Foundry also sells revenue execution consultancy. So the company publishing the measure also sells one of the kinds of help the measure can indicate.
Pretending otherwise would be worse than saying it. Here is exactly where the line sits.
- The diagnosis is deterministic. No commercial input touches the score, the stage or the root cause. The arithmetic is published and the conformance vectors let anyone check it
- The diagnosis names a category of help, never a supplier. Which provider appears within an indicated category is the only place a commercial arrangement can ever apply
- Licensees route to their own provision: their internal teams, their framework suppliers, their programmes
- Any provider we own or are affiliated with is disclosed as such, including us
- Consultancy is separately contracted. Never bundled into a licence, never a condition of one
Five commitments
- The instrument stays an instrument. The moment a measure makes decisions, the people it measures stop answering honestly.
- Companies never pay. Not at the start, not later, not for a premium tier.
- The method stays published. Every version, permanently, at its own address.
- We work with the people already doing the job. Advisers, accelerators and programmes keep their clients and their fees. We measure, they deliver.
- Unverified numbers are marked. Everywhere, including where it makes us look early.