The account your
company
runs on,
tested before
you
spend on changing
it.

The Sessions

Three sessions with the person who holds the company’s account of itself. In a founder-led firm that is the founder. Two of them work the account, with an outside check between them; the third presents the finding.

What You Supply

Your own account of the business, stated plainly
Whatever the outside check needs: a recorded sales conversation, an introduction to a client, or an introduction to someone who considered you and did not buy
Your public-facing materials

The first session is where the account comes out. What the business is, who it is for, what the work is worth — taken as propositions rather than as facts.

Between the sessions, the evidence. A recorded sales conversation, or an interview we conduct with one of your clients: either supplies an account of the company from outside it, which is what a reconstruction from memory cannot do, however accurate the memory. Better still is someone who considered you and did not buy — the hardest of the three to arrange, and the one that shows where the account stopped working. Alongside it, your materials, read the way a buyer reads them rather than the way they were written.

What the check consists of is settled before anything is scoped. Not every company records its sales calls, and a company selling before it has customers has no client to interview. Where no outside account is available, the test runs on the company’s own materials and on more than one account from inside it — what the writing claims, what the imagery says, what different people in the company say the business is, and where those come apart. Less rigorous than a buyer’s account, but enough to locate the pattern.

The second session is where the propositions meet that evidence, tested live, with you in front of it.

What the interviewee says stays with us. The findings enter the report; the transcript does not. That condition is what buys the fuller account — a client who knows his words go back to you tells a shorter version.

The third session is where the finding is presented to you in full — how it was reached, what supports it, and where it is thinnest. You are the only person who can say whether it holds against what you know that we do not. Challenge any part of it, including the conclusion.

The Outcome

The pattern named: which conversations stall, with which buyers, and at what point in the sale. Not the symptom you arrived with, but the shape it belongs to.

The proposition that did not survive contact with the evidence — what the company believes about itself that its own buyers do not confirm. That proposition is where the misread investigation would start, and the document says where it would go.

The account is preserved in your words, the baseline for whatever gets built later.

The analysis: what the account claimed, what the evidence returned, and where the two came apart.

The Other Outcome

The propositions can hold.

If the company’s account of itself matches what the evidence shows, there is no misread under the symptom, and the document says so — with what we expected to find, what the evidence showed instead, and why the account you have is the right one to keep.

The symptom is still real. What the document carries then is the problem we think is producing it, the evidence pointing that way, and how to test it — whether or not it is something we could work on.

A rebuild aimed at an account that was already accurate replaces the thing that was working with something less true, and the market learns the wrong company.

What It Is Not

The Diagnostic does not name the misread. It names the pattern and the proposition that did not hold, and says where the investigation would go from there. Naming the misread — where the mistake was made, how it functions, and what it costs at which point in the sale — takes interviews across your clients, your team, and the market, read against your materials and against what your competitors have trained your buyers to expect. One outside account is enough to break a proposition. It is not enough to establish what the market has mistaken you for or how to correct it.

Nothing is rebuilt. No positioning, no identity, no site. The Diagnostic ends where the evidence ends.

Request the Diagnostic

We read what you send and reply within two business days. The first conversation is about what you’re seeing, and there is no charge for it. Scope follows from that conversation, and price follows scope.