For Private Equity and Growth Investors

See where value stops transferring.

Your portfolio companies evolve. They acquire businesses, add capability, launch new offerings and hire new people.

But the story buyers see does not always evolve with them.

The result can appear elsewhere: founder dependency, missed revenue plans, acquisitions that fail to add up commercially, slow seller ramp, new offerings that struggle to land, or different parts of the business telling different stories.

The problems are visible. The cause often isn’t.

You already measure what happens downstream.

Pipeline. Conversion. Win rate. Sales cycle. Rep attainment. Revenue against plan.

All useful.

But every one measures what happens after a buyer enters the commercial system.

A buyer who reaches a portfolio company, fails to recognise their situation and leaves never enters those numbers.

And those metrics cannot tell you whether the value inside the company depends on a founder, a top salesperson or a handful of people to explain it.

We built two instruments to measure what you currently cannot see.

01  Commercial Transfer X-Ray

Can buyers see the value?

The X-Ray reads a portfolio company from the outside.

It assesses the commercial surface a buyer encounters and looks for whether the business makes the buyer's situation, value, relevance, proof and difference clear enough to continue.

No management interviews. No internal briefing.

That means we can run it across a portfolio before deciding where deeper investigation is warranted.

Start with breadth.

Portfolio → X-Ray → where buyers can see the value, and where it starts to disappear.

What it gives you

A consistent outside-in reading across portfolio companies.

Not a judgement on whether the underlying business is good.

A reading of whether a buyer can see what makes it valuable from the commercial surface in front of them.

Commercial Transfer Portco X-Ray

 

02  Commercial Transfer Discovery

Can the business carry the value?

Where the X-Ray looks from outside, the Discovery goes inside.

In five working days we examine whether the account of customer value travels consistently through the business.

3 executive interviews
What does leadership believe customers value?

5 commercial surfaces
What does the market see?

3 recorded sales conversations or roleplays
What can the commercial team carry?

The result is a readout of where commercial transfer breaks, between leadership belief, market expression and sales conversation.

What it does not tell you

It does not establish why customers actually chose the company.

That requires customer evidence.

Where the Discovery shows that internal assumptions need testing, customer interviews become the next step — not an assumption built into the diagnosis.

Commercial Transfer Discovery

Two readings. One picture.

Where does customer value stop transferring?

The X-Ray tells us what buyers can see.

The Discovery tells us what the business can carry.

Together, they produce four useful patterns:

X-Ray and Commercial Transfer Grid

A company takes its place on the grid once both readings exist.

This isn't a league table. It tells us where to look next.

Three moments when this matters

       

Pre-deal

Is there a repeatable account of why customers buy, or does too much of the commercial value still depend on the founder and a handful of people?

 

           

Post-investment

The business has new money and new targets. It may also have acquired businesses, added capability, launched products or hired a new commercial team.

Has the account buyers hear caught up with the business you've invested in?

                   

Pre-exit

The value may already exist inside the company.

The question is whether the next buyer can see it, and whether the organisation can explain it without depending on the people who created it.

 

The question underneath all three

Can the business explain what customers value without you in the room?

We work with company CEOs and investors at these moments, usually the person carrying the explanation today, or the investor who will eventually have to underwrite it.

We turn what a few people can explain into something the wider organisation can carry.

Bring us one portfolio company

We don't need to start with the whole portfolio.

Give us one company where the numbers tell you something isn't travelling as it should, and we'll start from the outside.

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