Instrumentation for business support

Revenue tells you what already happened.

It never tells you what to fix.

The Growth Score measures a single company across the four stages of commercial capability in eight minutes, names the root cause of what is holding it back, and gives it the fix. Then it measures again, so the movement is visible long before it reaches the accounts. Free for founders, always. Licensed to the institutions that fund them.

Request a demonstration See how the measure works

The problem

Every measure you hold arrives after the point where you could have done anything about it.

At the front, the attendance register: applications, attendees, businesses supported, lifetime totals. Counted at the door. It tells you the room was full.

At the back, the accounts: revenue, headcount, survival. Real, and far too late. By the time growth shows in the numbers, the decision that caused it was made a long time ago and the chance to change it has gone.

Between the two there is nothing. No measure of whether a company is actually capable of selling what it has built, no record of what was wrong, and no way to tell whether it got better.

So years of backing the wrong thing looks identical, on paper, to years of backing the right thing, until the accounts come in and say so.

Nobody chose this. Until now the instrument did not exist.

The same cohort, two resolutions

One number, or two hundred.

You already hold the companies. What you do not hold is a position for each one, taken the same way, twice, upstream of the accounts.

Nothing here is a prediction and nothing here is a rating. It measures the conditions that have to be true before a company can grow, against the same reference every time, so the second measurement can be set against the first.

Cohort view / illustrative

Measures available1

Companies you can name0

Movement you can evidenceNone

What changes

Measures that go from not existing to existing.

We do not claim to improve your outcomes. We claim that after the first cycle you can see things you cannot see now, months earlier than the accounts would have shown them, and put them in front of a board, a funder or a committee.

Measure	Today	After one cycle
Commercial readiness of a named company	Does not exist	A position on a scale, dated
What is holding that company back	Adviser opinion, unrecorded	A named root cause, recorded, with the fix
When you find out something changed	When it reaches the accounts	At the next measurement, months earlier
Movement across a cohort	Does not exist	Baseline to endline, per company
Which support changed anything	Inferred	Attributable to a routed intervention
Comparison between two programmes	Not possible, different metrics	Same instrument, same scale
Evidence for the next funding round	Throughput and testimony	A quarterly report you did not have to commission

How it works

01 / Measure

Four stages, eight minutes

A founder answers a fixed set of questions covering the four stages of commercial capability. No documents, no data room, no adviser required.

02 / Diagnose

The root cause, not the symptom

The score comes with the reason for it. Not a grade, a diagnosis: the specific thing that is holding this company back, and the one to fix first.

03 / Fix

A route to the work

The diagnosis names the fix and points to the intervention that delivers it, inside your programme or outside it.

04 / Rescore

Movement, before the accounts

Measure again. Capability moves months before revenue does, so the report shows the change while there is still something you can do with it.

Deterministic, not generative. The same answers produce the same score every time, and the method is disclosed to you in full. It is a measurement instrument. It does not make or influence any decision about a company.

The method in full

Who licenses it

The same instrument. Four different problems.

Banks

You bank them before they are worth banking

And they leave for someone else at the exact moment they become valuable, because nothing flagged that they were scaling.

For banks Public bodies

Throughput is no longer evidence

Budgets are smaller and the next settlement will ask what changed, not how many attended.

For public bodies Universities

Commercialisation you cannot evidence

Spin-out and enterprise funding is defended with counts of participants, not proof of readiness.

For universities and accelerators Investors

You reject most of it on paper

Deal flow is unfiltered and undifferentiated, and your own portfolio movement is not measured.

For investors and funds

Evidence

We will not show you a logo wall.

Five lines per engagement: the sector, the size, what was broken, what we put in, what changed. If a number is not verified, it is not on this page.

All engagements

Engagement 01 / sector to confirm

What was broken. Real situation needed

What we put in. Real intervention needed

What changed. Real, verified figure needed

Placeholders stay visible until Charles, Gordon or Vicki supplies the verified figure. Nothing on this site is invented.

Measure one cohort. Decide after that.

A bounded pilot: one programme, one cohort, a baseline now and an endline at the end. One report. No platform migration, no integration, no standing commitment.

Founders are never charged. The measure is free to them, forever.
You license the aggregate view, the routing and the reporting.
Fixed fee, published range, agreed before the pilot starts.

Request a demonstration

For banks

You bank them at the start, and lose them at the moment they become worth banking.

Start-up propositions are measured in accounts opened, attendees and businesses supported. The commercial side is measured in balances and transactions. One is counted too early to mean anything and the other moves only after the customer has already scaled. By the time the account shows it, the lending, the foreign exchange and the corporate advice have been bought somewhere else.

The gap

Two sides of the bank, one missing signal.

The programme side needs evidence that its accelerator, hub or partnership produced something. The commercial side needs to know which customers to look after, while there is still time to look after them. Both are asking for the same thing: a per company measure, taken twice, ahead of the accounts.

Everything published today is aggregate, lifetime and retrospective. That is not a criticism of the programme. It is the only thing the current instrumentation can produce.

What a bank gets

A readiness position per business customer who completes it, dated
Movement across a cohort between two dates, per company
A quarterly report the programme can put in front of its own board
A routing signal: the named thing this customer needs next
Your brand on the front of it, if you want it there

The firewall

It is not a credit signal and it must never be used as one.

The Growth Score does not assess creditworthiness, does not feed lending decisions, and is not an input to any affordability, pricing or risk model. It measures commercial readiness as reported by the company itself.

We state this before you have to ask, and we will state it in the contract. If your risk function needs the method in full before a pilot, we hand it over in full.

Two buyers, one instrument

Every bank holds this problem twice.

The programme side

Accelerators, hubs, partnerships

Runs on grant or marketing money and reports in participation. Needs per company evidence that the programme changed something, before the next budget round asks for it. This buyer needs the quarterly report.

The relationship side

Business and commercial banking

Manages hundreds of accounts per RM and finds out a customer was scaling from the account behaviour, after the event. This buyer needs the signal: which customers to spend the scarce attention on, and what those customers need next. That is where the commercial value compounds.

The pilot starts on the programme side, because the evidence problem is funded and immediate. The relationship side is where it grows.

The payoff

What exists after one cycle that does not exist now.

Measure	Today	After one cycle
Which programme members are building commercial capability	Unknown until the account moves	A dated position per member, refreshed each cycle
Evidence the programme produced anything	Attendance and satisfaction	Movement per company, baseline to endline
What a scaling customer needs next	Discovered in conversation, if at all	A named gap, recorded, ahead of the account showing it
The board answer on the SME commitment	Aggregate lifetime totals	A quarterly report, per cohort, comparable year on year

Wearing your brand or ours. A bank-branded measure inside your programme, or the neutral instrument alongside it. Both exist; the method underneath is identical either way.

First engagement

One cohort, one quarter, one report.

A bounded pilot inside an existing programme. We baseline the cohort, route what the diagnosis calls for, measure again at the end, and hand you the report. Priced as its own line, not folded into an existing contract.

Request a demonstration What we do not claim

For combined authorities, agencies and growth hubs

"We put 200 companies through the programme" is not going to survive the next settlement.

Devolved budgets are smaller and the questions are harder. Throughput was acceptable evidence when the money was growing. It will not be acceptable evidence when the money is being reallocated, and the programmes that can show movement will be the ones that keep their funding.

The product

A quarterly impact report you did not have to commission.

The data already exists inside your programmes. What does not exist is the report: baseline to endline, per company, comparable between one delivery partner and another because every company was measured with the same instrument.

The sentence changes from "we put 200 companies through" to "we measured 200 companies, and this proportion moved, after this intervention".

Two ways to pay for it

The authority licenses it centrally and requires its programmes to use it
Or each delivery partner funds it from support money already allocated to them, at no new cost to the authority

The second route needs no new budget line. Measurement is bought out of a fraction of the delivery money already committed.

Comparability

The point is not one report. It is that two reports can be compared.

Every delivery partner currently reports in its own format, against its own metrics, on its own timetable. Nothing can be set against anything else, so procurement decisions come down to relationship and narrative.

One instrument across every programme in a region produces the first like for like view an authority has ever had of its own portfolio of support.

What the report contains

The quarterly report, page by page.

Per programme

Cohort movement

Every company measured at intake and at exit. The proportion that moved, the average movement, and the stage where movement happened.

Per company

Position and cause

Where each company stands, what was named as the root cause, what intervention was routed, and what changed at the next measurement.

Across the portfolio

Like for like

Every programme on the same instrument, so one delivery partner can be set against another for the first time, on evidence rather than narrative.

The sentence you take to the next settlement changes. From "we put 200 companies through the programme" to "we measured 200 companies, this proportion improved, and here is the intervention that did it".

The payoff

What exists after one cycle that does not exist now.

Measure	Today	After one cycle
Outcome evidence per programme	Throughput, self reported by the provider	Movement per company, same instrument across providers
Comparison between delivery partners	Not possible, different metrics	Like for like, on one scale
Where support money should concentrate	Committee judgement	The stages and causes that recur across the portfolio, counted
The impact report itself	Commissioned, occasional, expensive	Produced quarterly as a by-product of delivery

First engagement

One programme, one cohort, one quarter.

Baseline the cohort at intake, measure again at exit, receive the report. If the report is not something you would put in front of a funder, you do not continue.

Request a demonstration

For universities, accelerators and programme partners

The research is world class. The evidence that anything commercialised is a headcount.

Enterprise and commercialisation funding is defended with participation: founders trained, teams supported, spin-outs formed. The gap between forming a spin-out and that spin-out being commercially ready is exactly where the money is lost, and it is the part nobody measures.

The gap

Commercial awareness is the blocker, and it is not on anyone's dashboard.

Technical founders coming out of a research environment are strong on the product and unpractised at selling it. That is not a criticism, it is a predictable and fixable pattern. But you cannot fix at scale what you cannot see per team.

What a programme gets

A readiness position for every team at intake
The named blocker per team, so support is targeted not generic
Movement at exit, per team, in a report you can attach to the next bid
A comparable measure across cohorts and across years

Two clocks, and both of them are yours.

Enterprise and innovation funding is frequently use it or lose it, unspent at the year end, and lost entirely if it is not committed in time.

The second clock is the tender. An accelerator bidding against another accelerator for the same regional money, one of them holding evidence of movement and the other holding attendance figures, is not a close contest.

The bid

The next funding application, with evidence attached.

Enterprise, innovation and commercialisation money is increasingly awarded on demonstrated outcomes. A bid that says "we trained 60 founders" is competing against a bid that says "we measured 60 teams, named the blocker for each, and this proportion moved before demo day".

The second bid does not exist today because the measurement does not exist. After one cohort, it does, and every subsequent cohort compounds it: cohort against cohort, year against year, on the same scale.

What goes in the bid

Intake and exit positions for every team, dated
The distribution of root causes across the cohort
Movement, per team and per stage
The interventions routed, and what moved after them

The payoff

Measure	Today	After one cohort
Commercial readiness of a spin-out or venture team	Adviser impression	A dated position across four stages
Where enterprise support should focus	The same workshop for everyone	Targeted at the named blocker per team
Evidence for the next funding bid	Participation counts	Movement, per team, comparable across cohorts
Progress between cohorts and years	Not measured	Same instrument, same scale, every intake

On procurement: where a new supplier route would take longer than the funding window allows, we contract through an existing procured supplier. The measurement starts inside the window; the paperwork follows the route that already exists.

First engagement

One cohort. Measured in, measured out.

We can contract through an existing procured supplier where a new supplier route would take longer than the money has left.

Request a demonstration

For funds, syndicates and corporate finance

You reject most of what reaches you, and you reject it on paper.

Deal flow arrives unfiltered, undifferentiated and mostly unready. The filtering happens in the first few slides, in minutes, by a human. Everything before that point is cost, and everything after it is memory.

Two things we do

Filter the inbound. Then evidence the portfolio.

First, your own criteria, weighted by you, applied consistently to everything that arrives. Not our view of a good company. Yours, made explicit and then applied the same way every time.

Second, and this is the part that compounds: every company you back is measured on the same instrument, twice a year. Three years in, when you are raising the next fund with no exits to point at, you have a portfolio that can be shown to have moved.

What a fund gets

Your criteria, captured by weighting rather than by a blank form
A consistent readiness position on inbound companies
Portfolio movement between two dates, per company
An evidence pack for your own investors, not written from scratch

Founders are diligencing you now, too.

When two funds are competing for the same company, the one that can show its portfolio companies got measurably better is holding an argument the other one does not have.

We do not claim a score predicts or improves the likelihood of investment. It reports a position and its movement. Nothing more.

Your criteria, made explicit

We do not ask you to fill in a blank sheet.

Most investors cannot state their own criteria from a standing start, and the deals they actually do rarely match the criteria they would write down. So we do not ask. We give you the criteria and you weight them.

A fixed budget of votes across the full set. Marking something mission critical costs most of the budget, so only a few things can be, which is the point. The weighting forces the real priorities to the surface, and stops everything being scored a middling two.

What the weighting produces

Your criteria on the record, weighted, revisable any time
Inbound companies read against your weighting, not a generic one
Consistency: the same company reads the same way in January and June
A reason attached to every pass, which today does not exist

How matching behaves

No spraying. Terms agreed before any introduction.

Consent

Both sides opt in

A company chooses to enter matching. You see companies that clear your weighted threshold. Nobody's deck is forwarded anywhere without them choosing it.

Terms first

In writing, in advance

The terms of an introduction are shown to both sides and agreed digitally before it is made. Including who the company is already talking to, so nobody is introduced to a conversation that already exists.

Always on

Not a one-off event

Matches are visible whenever you log in, and refreshed as companies rescore. A company two fixes short of your threshold today may clear it next quarter, and you see that happen.

The fund raise after this one

The portfolio evidence problem, solved before you need it.

A first fund raises its successor years before exits exist. The conversation with institutional investors turns on one question: can you show the portfolio moved. Measured twice a year on the same instrument, it can, per company, from the day of investment. That evidence pack cannot be reconstructed later. It can only be started now.

Measure	Today	With the portfolio on the instrument
Inbound filtering	Manual, minutes per deck, no record	Read against your weighted criteria, consistently
Portfolio progress between rounds	Board pack anecdote and revenue lag	Movement per company, twice a year, same scale
The LP evidence pack	Written from scratch, unverifiable	Produced from the measurement record
Post-investment support	Generic	Aimed at each company's named blocker

Corporate finance

We do not want your clients. We want your clients measured.

Advisers who bring their client base onto the instrument keep the relationship, keep the mandate and keep the fee. What they gain is time back on preparation, and evidence to hand their own investors. Terms are agreed in advance, in writing, before anything is introduced.

Talk to us

The method

Eight minutes, disclosed in full, and the same answers always produce the same score.

Institutions are asked to put their name on this, so nothing about how it works is hidden from them. Any licensing conversation starts with the full method, including the questions, the weighting and the scoring logic.

Four stages

What the measure covers

Commercial capability, broken into four stages. A company scores on each, so the diagnosis points at a stage and not at a vague weakness. Four stage names to be supplied, not invented

Deterministic

Not generative

The score is calculated, not written. Identical answers return an identical score today, next quarter and next year. Without that, movement between two dates means nothing.

Self reported

Stated plainly

The instrument measures what the company reports about how it sells. We describe it that way in every report, so no reader mistakes it for verified financial data.

Non decisioning

Never an input to a decision

It is not a credit signal, not an eligibility test, not an approval gate and not a ranking of companies against each other. It is a position on a scale.

The cycle

Baseline, route, measure again, report.

Stage	What happens	What it produces
Baseline	The company completes the measure at intake, in eight minutes, unassisted, across all four stages	A dated position, a stage-by-stage breakdown and a named root cause
Fix and route	The diagnosis names the fix and points to the intervention that delivers it, inside your programme or outside	A recorded, attributable intervention
Rescore	The same measure, taken again at the end of the cycle, or any time the company chooses	Movement per company and per stage, ahead of any change in the accounts
Report	Aggregated for the licensee, quarterly	Evidence for a board, a funder or a committee

Questions we expect

Asked by every risk, legal and procurement review so far. Answered here first.

Question	Answer
Can a company game it?	It is self reported and we say so on every output. The check is the rescore: a flattering answer set produces no movement to report, and movement is what every licensee is buying. The instrument rewards honesty structurally, not by policing.
Is it a rating agency?	No. A rating exists to inform someone else's decision about the company. The Score exists to inform the company, and the licensee sees cohort movement. It is not published, not a league table, and not a decision input.
Can we inspect the questions and scoring?	Yes, in full, before any pilot. Institutions putting their name near an instrument get the whole instrument.
What happens to the data if we leave?	Companies keep their own results, always. The licensee's cohort reporting ends. Exit terms, including what the licensee retains, are written into the licence, not negotiated at the exit.
Does it replace our advisers, mentors or programmes?	No, it aims them. The diagnosis routes each company to the support you already run. It makes existing spend more targeted; it does not substitute for it.

Data

The company owns its own result.

A founder gets their score and their diagnosis in full, free, whether or not the institution that invited them ever sees it. Nothing is shared with a licensee without the company being told what is shared and with whom.

Free to the company. Forever. There is no upgrade and no paywalled result.
Licensees receive the aggregate view and the per company view for their own cohort only.
No company data is sold, brokered or passed to a third party.
Full processing terms and a data protection impact assessment are provided before any pilot.

Stated up front

What we are deliberately not claiming.

Most of this market sells certainty it does not have. The following list is the reason a risk function, a legal team or a procurement panel can approve this quickly, and it is published here rather than conceded in a meeting.

We do not claim to improve the probability of investment. The Growth Score reports a position and its movement. It does not predict, influence or guarantee a funding outcome.
We do not claim it is a credit or risk signal. It must not be used as an input to lending, affordability, pricing or eligibility decisions, and we will say so in the contract.
We do not claim the data is verified. It is what the company reports about how it sells. That is stated on every report.
We do not claim to rank companies against each other. A score is a position against a fixed reference, not a league table.
We do not claim to predict growth. The Score measures the commercial conditions that have to be true before a company can grow, and whether they are improving. That is upstream of growth. It is not a forecast of it.
We do not claim causation. A company that moved after an intervention moved after an intervention. The report says exactly that and no more.
We do not claim your outcomes will improve. We claim you will be able to see them. What you then do about them is your work, not ours.
We do not invent proof. Any figure on this site that is not verified is marked as a placeholder until it is.

Ask us a harder question

Evidence

Five lines per engagement. No logo wall.

A decision maker reading a situation that looks like their own believes it. A stranger's testimonial does not survive five seconds of scrutiny, so there are none here.

01 / sector / size

Broken. real situation

Put in. real intervention

Changed. verified figure

one real line from the client

02 / sector / size

Broken. real situation

Put in. real intervention

Changed. verified figure

one real line from the client

03 / sector / size

Broken. real situation

Put in. real intervention

Changed. verified figure

one real line from the client

Every placeholder above is deliberate. Nothing goes on this page until the person who lived it confirms the figure. If that leaves the page thin for a quarter, the page stays thin for a quarter.

About

A trig point is the fixed mark everything else is measured from.

Britain was surveyed from a network of them: concrete pillars on high ground, each one visible from the next, each one a known position. No pillar told you where to go. It told you exactly where you were standing, and every measurement taken from it could be compared with every other.

That is the whole idea. Business support has never had a fixed reference. Every programme measures differently, so nothing can be set against anything else, and the sector argues from narrative because it has nothing else to argue from.

Who we are

A joint venture between two businesses that were already doing half of this.

One side built the diagnostic: twenty five years of commercial practice, turned into a measure of how a company actually sells and what is stopping it.

The other side has the network: the founders, the investors, the institutions and the events where they all meet.

Entity name, registration and formal description to be confirmed. Partner names and roles to be agreed before publication.

How we work

Five commitments, in writing.

The instrument stays an instrument. The moment a measure starts making decisions, it stops being trusted by the people it measures. We stay on the measurement side of that line, permanently.
Founders never pay. Not at the start, not later, not for a premium tier. The measure is free to the company being measured, forever.
The method is disclosed. Any institution licensing the Score sees the full method before signing. No black box.

We partner with the ecosystem, not against it. Advisers, accelerators, corporate finance houses and programmes keep their clients and their fees. We measure; they deliver.
Unverified numbers are marked, everywhere. On this site, in every report and in every deck, a figure we cannot stand behind is shown as a placeholder, not dressed as a fact.

The position

We are not trying to replace anyone in this market.

Not the accelerators, not the advisers, not the corporate finance houses, not the growth hubs. All of them are doing work that needs doing. None of them can currently prove it. We are the instrument, and we are useful precisely to the degree that we stay one.

Contact

See it measure a real company.

A demonstration takes twenty minutes. Bring a company you know well and we will measure it live, in front of you, and you can tell us whether the diagnosis is right.

No deck first. The instrument first.
The full method, including the scoring, before any commercial conversation.
A bounded pilot is the only thing we will ask you to agree to.

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