Start with one company. Scale what works.
No firm should buy a portfolio-wide method on a thesis. Start with the single company where the growth question is most live, run it end to end, and judge the method on that. What follows is a sequence, not a menu — and every step is optional.
How this is structured
Three principles decide the shape of every engagement, and they're worth stating before any number appears.
One company first. The unit of work is a portfolio company, not a fund mandate. It bounds your exposure, it produces a real artifact you can judge, and it means the second engagement is a decision made on evidence rather than on a relationship.
Priced to the decision, not the hour. You are not buying analyst time. You are buying a defensible answer to where growth comes from, and the fee reflects the weight of the decision rather than the duration of the work.
Sequenced, never bundled. Each step earns the next. Nothing renews automatically, and no step requires a commitment to the one after it.
Two ways in
Most firms arrive through one of two doors, depending on where the clock is.
Before the letter of intent. Technology and IP evidence on a target, delivered inside the diligence window: what the company actually owns, what it's exposed to, whose filings sit across its path, and where the technical thesis is thinner than the model assumes. The forward growth plan is included, not billed separately — once we are in the data room, building it costs us far less than it would cost you to commission, and it is the part you cannot get anywhere else. Technology & IP evidence →
After close, on a company already owned. The growth engagement proper: evidence assembled, directions scored against a thesis you set, kill criteria named, scenarios tested with the operating team. Best run early in the hold — the earlier the growth is planned, the more of it is left to deliver. The growth engagement →
Firms that come in pre-LOI and then buy the growth engagement post-close are the common pattern, and it's the one we'd recommend. It means the first real money is spent after you've already seen the work.
The ladder
Each rung earns the next. Most firms never buy all of them, and that's the design — the point is that the capability transfers, not that the engagement continues.
Growth Gap Diagnostic
Self-serve VFR Score with the two gaps scored separately. Four minutes, one company, no call. The entry point to everything below.
Second Founding Sprint
Sixteen weeks. Evidence assembled, three to four directions scored against your thesis, kill criteria named, a governing statement of intent, and the portfolio mix written down. A decision system, not a deck.
Scenario Planning + Opportunity Catalog
Turns approved directions into testable scenarios: use cases, technical requirements, partnership shapes, field-trial structures, term-sheet frameworks, go-to-market sequencing.
Product Roadmap + Capability Development
Build, buy, partner or invest — decided and then run. We stay alongside through the actual transaction, so the muscle is built by using it rather than by reading about it.
Portfolio Discipline
Continuing governance. Keeps the kill criteria enforced and stops strategy drifting quietly back into activity, which is the part that fails first.
Strategic Intelligence Retainer
Continuous market radar across the portfolio's technical space. Filings, standards, competitor and channel movement — surfaced between diligence cycles rather than at them.
EVOS Platform Integration
The graduation. Your companies move from Rapid Alpha as infrastructure to EVOS as infrastructure, with the evidence base and the decision record held in one place across the hold.
There are no list prices, and that is deliberate. Every engagement is scoped against one company, one thesis and one deadline, and quoted individually. What is fixed is the shape — what you get, in what order, and what stays with you afterwards.
Running in parallel to the ladder is the IP infrastructure track — creation and prosecution support, monetisation programmes, and patent claim charting delivered as a product rather than a project. It's the wedge most firms meet us through, and it's where the evidentiary habit on every other rung comes from.
How we price
Value, not hours — and the reason is practical rather than philosophical. Hourly pricing rewards us for taking longer, which is precisely the wrong incentive on work whose entire value is a faster, better-evidenced decision.
Two consequences worth knowing before a conversation. We don't discount. If the fee doesn't fit, we restructure the scope — narrow the thesis area, reduce the number of directions, stage it across two quarters. What we won't do is quietly do less work for less money and let you find out at delivery.
And the cost of delay is the number to weigh against the fee, not the cost of the engagement in isolation. A deal now needs 10–12% annual EBITDA growth to carry a 2.5x, against roughly 5% a decade ago (Bain Global PE Report, 2026), and the returns that used to come from multiple expansion and cheap leverage — 59% of them between 2010 and 2022 — aren't coming back (McKinsey Global Private Markets Report, 2026). A hold year spent not knowing where growth comes from is the expensive option.
Capacity
The on-site component is delivered by the people who did the analysis, which is deliberate and which caps how many engagements run at once.
We'd rather tell you the next available window than take the work and staff it thin. If the timing doesn't fit, we'll say so on the first call.
Start with the company where the question is live
A working session, one hour, on a single portfolio company. We come having read what's public. You leave knowing whether the method fits, and with a scope and a number if it does.