Sixteen weeks. Six to eight tested bets. One decision system that outlasts us.
The method is the product. Evidence assembled in four phases, opportunities built as testable units rather than ideas, each one carried to a decision — advance, hold, or reject — and the whole thing built with the people who have to run it afterwards.
Nothing here should feel unfamiliar
You already own a rigorous process for deciding whether to buy a company. Evidence gets assembled, assumptions get named, someone argues the other side, and a number comes out the far end you are willing to sign.
This is that process, pointed forward. Same evidentiary standard, same insistence that a claim without a source is not a claim. The difference is the question: not what is this company worth today but where does the next twelve percent come from, and how would we know early if we were wrong.
One rule governs the whole engagement, and it is worth stating before anything else. The vision is not brainstormed. It is synthesised. Everything below exists to make that possible.
When a company needs a second founding
A second founding is what happens when a company redefines how it creates value, competes and grows after it has already proven it can. It is not incremental strategy, not optimisation of the current product line, and not a planning exercise that happens once.
The arithmetic is what makes it urgent rather than interesting. A decade ago roughly 5% annual EBITDA growth carried a 2.5x; today it takes 10–12% (Bain Global PE Report, 2026). A company that has proven one model and plateaued is no longer generating the growth its own valuation assumes.
It becomes necessary when ambition and execution stop matching. You hear it before you see it — we have too many initiatives, we are not sure where to focus, we need to grow but don't know where to invest. Then you see it in the behaviour: a roadmap that reflects current capabilities rather than a future position, strategy resets that keep repeating, investment that does not convert into traction, decisions made in fragments.
What comes out the other side is not a document. It is a decision system that keeps aligning direction, opportunity selection and execution after we have gone.
Four phases, sixteen weeks
The sequence is fixed because each phase feeds the next. Nothing later can be built on evidence the earlier phase did not gather.
Value chain and industry scanning
Map where value actually sits — upstream and downstream players, and where it is shifting. Build the company and competitor dataset: product taxonomy, positioning, real capabilities. Scan the technical field across patents, publications and emerging technology. Layer in geography, regulation and operating conditions. This is the foundation everything downstream is tested against.
Market analysis and competitive positioning
Segment existing and adjacent markets and their growth dynamics. Establish who wins where, and why. Identify where demand and capability actually intersect — and classify each opportunity against a growth pathway: penetration, market development, product development, diversification.
Voice of customer validation
Not internal workshops — interviews with the market. Each conversation is designed against a specific hypothesis, so what comes back either supports it or kills it. Pain points, buying triggers, friction, and evidence of willingness to pay. The work starts from the customer's world rather than the company's idea of itself, which is the step most strategy work skips.
Synthesis into a decision system
Score every tested unit on market opportunity, technical viability, competitive position and fit with what the business actually values. Cluster the survivors into three or four programmes. Attach activation triggers and kill criteria to each. Balance the portfolio across the four growth pathways, sequence the roadmap, and name the dependencies.
The unit of work is a testable bet, not an idea
Every opportunity is built as a strategic test unit — one specific combination of a technology, a market context and a growth pathway. Six to eight per engagement.
Each carries an opportunity hypothesis, the technical and market evidence behind it, a feasibility assessment, the customer signal where we have one, and a recommendation: advance, hold, or reject. One or two that survive become a programme.
That structure is what makes the work auditable. Every task in every phase has to answer one question — does this help advance, hold or reject a unit? If it does not, it is waste, and it does not get done. The same test applies to evidence: a fact that clarifies what the company is good at, how it makes money, what its customers will need, or what future it can credibly win in, is signal. Anything else is noise.
What you actually receive
Four things, and none of them is a report.
Six to eight strategic test units, each scored and each carrying a decision. Three to four strategic programmes, each with its objective, target market, activation triggers, kill criteria, required capabilities and sequencing. A portfolio mix showing how those programmes distribute across the four growth pathways, and therefore where you are over- and under-weight. And a commander's intent — the boundaries of where the company will and will not compete, the priority domains, and the logic for activating or discontinuing a programme without reopening the whole debate.
That last one is the durable object. It is the thing leadership uses to decide, months after the engagement closes, without calling us.
What your firm keeps
The capability is installed through execution, which is a specific claim worth unpacking. We do not run a parallel workstream and hand over findings. Your people score the units, argue the kill criteria and sit in the customer interviews, so the method transfers by having been practised rather than documented.
The analytical load rides on EVOS, and the split is deliberate: the system does the data assembly and first-pass analysis, people do the judgement. That is what changes the economics — analysts stop building datasets and start validating them, and the expensive hours move from construction to decision. It compressed a patent claim-charting job from months to two days with a single analyst. What EVOS is →
Check any of it
Every conclusion traces to a primary source with a date. Not a footnote to a syndicated report that footnotes someone else — the filing, the publication, the patent, the interview.
This is deliberate. A boutique cannot borrow credibility from a logo, so the deliverable has to carry it instead, and an investment committee is better served by a conclusion it can interrogate than a brand name attached to a view it cannot. We built and ran a full-lifecycle IP programme at Element3 and stood up patent capability at Adeia's scale — 4,000+ patents across 68 domains — which is where the evidentiary habit comes from. Read the case files →
The analysis is deliberately not exhaustive. We gather the evidence required to support or reject specific bets, and stop. Mapping a market completely is a way of avoiding the decision.
Where this doesn't apply
It does not work on a company that has not proven its first business model — there is no core to grow from, and the exercise becomes speculation. It does not work where the leadership team has been told to cooperate rather than asked; the customer-validation phase depends on their networks and their candour, and neither can be mandated. And it does not compress below sixteen weeks without cutting the validation phase, which is the phase that stops you funding a bet the market was never going to want.
Saying so is part of the method. A firm that claims every situation fits has not examined many of them.
Three levers, and the evidence that decides between them
Sometimes the gap closes on marketing — the offer is right and the market has never properly heard it, so the work is pricing, channel, positioning and win rate. Sometimes it closes on product and technology — the customers you have need features or whole products you don't build yet, or what you build is worth more to a segment you don't serve. Sometimes it closes on corporate development, because the capability the plan needs is faster to buy, license or partner into than to build inside a 6.6-year hold.
Most gaps close on some of each, which is why the answer is a portfolio rather than a bet. What isn't optional is scoring the three against the same evidence base before capital moves — market, technology, IP and customer signal — so the split is a decision with a source behind it rather than the preference of whoever spoke last.
The third lever is where the Capability Gap usually surfaces. A plan that has to close through corporate development, at a company where nobody has carried a licensing deal or a bolt-on from term sheet to integration, isn't a strategy problem. It's a muscle problem, and it goes undiagnosed because the strategy looks fine on paper.
Inside the second lever, market risk and technology risk get scored separately
“Build something new” is three different bets wearing one label, and the difference is which kind of risk you're taking. Selling more of the current product to the current market is a penetration question and the risk is commercial. A new product for existing customers is a technology risk against a known buyer. The current product into a new segment or geography is a market risk against a known capability. Both new at once is diversification, and the two risks compound rather than add — which is why it gets the smallest allocation and the earliest kill criterion.
Every candidate is placed on that grid before it is funded, so the portfolio can be checked for what it is actually loaded with. A company whose entire plan sits in the far corner has a risk concentration nobody named out loud.
Start with one company
The diagnostic scores your Vision Gap and your Capability Gap separately in about four minutes — one portfolio company, no call, no pitch. You'll know which gap is load-bearing before you decide whether the method is worth a conversation.