The Growth Pattern Diagnostic
Most owners cannot see which one until they are already in it. Sixteen questions about how your company actually runs, about three minutes, and at the end your Growth Constellation: six readings on the company, where you sit in the pattern, and what to watch for the next ninety days.
What you get
Not a score out of a hundred and not a label. A reading: six measurements across both halves of the company, a position on the line every service business travels, and three things to watch that you can start on Monday.
Part one
Three on the people side and three on the business side, scored from your answers. The dashed line is what structure keeping pace with growth looks like at your size. Where your shape pulls inside it is where the reading starts.
A sample constellation, not yours
The six axes
Part two
Every service and skilled trades business passes the same four places, and they arrive at roughly the same revenue every time. Your revenue band puts you on the line. Your answers say whether you are ready for the next one.
Sample position, between the first and second zone
The four Danger Zones
Part three
The reading names the two or three places where your shape pulls in, explains why your answers read that way, and gives you one thing to watch on each. None of it needs a program to start. It needs attention pointed at the right places, and you leave with those places named.
What the watch list looks like
From the sample constellation above
How it works
The diagnostic is built from thirty years of applied practice with service and skilled trades businesses between $2M and $20M. Over that many companies the same things get said at the same revenue, in almost the same words. The questions are those things, turned around and asked back to you.
Three set which zone we test you against: what the company does, how many people it holds, and what it billed in the last twelve months. The other thirteen are about how it actually runs. Two of them almost nobody gets right on the first try, and the answers to those two are usually where the reading starts.
One of the two
Do you know which of your clients you make money on, and which ones you lose money on?
The other
Think about this week. How many decisions came to you that only you could have made?
What it is worth
Three numbers. All of them are estimates, and we would rather show the working than put a price sticker on a free page.
Bought as a diagnostic
What a structured owner diagnostic is commonly sold for by advisory practices working with companies your size, usually as a discovery engagement over a week or two. This one asks sixteen questions, not sixty, and takes three minutes, so treat that range as the ceiling, not the claim. What it produces, six readings and a zone placement built on the same pattern the paid work uses, is the part that is the same.
With Govindh, if you want it
Thirty minutes with Govindh Jayaraman walking your constellation with you, booked straight from your results into a real gap in his calendar. At ordinary senior advisory rates that is a few hundred dollars of time. It is the only part of this that involves a person, no pitch and no proposal, and it is the part that turns a reading into a decision.
The cost of reading the zone wrong
Three points of margin leaking into overhead on $6M of revenue. That is the signature of the second zone, and owners in it almost always go looking for a sales problem instead. The reading costs nothing. Misreading the zone costs this, every year it goes unread, and a management hire made under that pressure that does not work out is commonly put at one and a half to two times salary on top.
The reading is free because it is how we find out whether the assessment is worth doing, for you and for us. That is the whole commercial logic, and we would rather state it than dress it up. If your constellation says the next zone is a long way off, the reading tells you that too, and you have lost three minutes.
The $2,500 to $7,500 range is our estimate of typical discovery-engagement pricing across small business advisory firms, not a quote from anyone. The margin arithmetic is three percentage points on $6M. The hiring figure is the commonly cited rule of thumb for the total cost of a failed hire, including the time to replace them.
Read this before you start
We read a business before we say anything about it, and that reading is real work: four years of financials, two years of customer margins, your own written view on seven areas. This tells you which pattern your answers match, and whether that reading is worth having.
What it is
The scoring is simple on purpose. Each answer is a reading of one or two of the six axes, your revenue band places you on the line, and the reading is written from the combination. It will be right about the shape more often than it is right about the detail, which is exactly what a three-minute diagnostic should promise.
Under $2M? The reading still works. It tells you what the first zone will test as you approach it, and the program itself is built for $2M to $20M. We would rather say that here than after a call.
What it is not
Sixteen questions cannot see a P&L. They can only see what you believe about it, and the gap between the two is often the whole story. If the reading lands, the next honest step is the thirty-minute read-through, and after that, if it makes sense to both of us, the assessment.
There is no pitch at the end of the diagnostic and no proposal on the first call. If we are not the right people for what your constellation shows, we will say so.
What happens after
The constellation comes to you on screen the moment you finish, and prints cleanly if you want it on paper. We keep a copy against your email, so if you write to us or book the read-through, we start from the same picture. What happens next is up to you. Most owners sit with it. Some want to talk it through. Both are fine.
Govindh Jayaraman
Co-founder, Growth & Impact Partners. Creator of Paper Napkin Wisdom. The read-through is with him.
Michael Walsh
Co-founder. Founder of Walsh Business Growth Institute and author of Freedom By Design. The pattern is his.
Free. About three minutes. No pitch at the end, a reading.