Methodology
How we evaluate a growth decision.
A platform that recommends what your business should do next owes you its definitions, its philosophy, and its boundaries. Here they are.
The vocabulary, defined once
| Business Model | How the business creates, delivers, and captures value. |
|---|---|
| Growth Move | The strategic change being considered. A new subscription, a price increase, a second location, a partnership. Growth Moves answer: what strategic change is the business considering? |
| Revenue Model | The method through which the business creates and captures revenue. One Revenue Model may support several Growth Moves. |
| Capacity | What the business can absorb: delivery, team, cash, systems, attention. |
| Capability | What the business knows how to execute well. |
| Business Readiness | Whether the conditions a move requires actually exist yet, and what must change first if they do not. |
| Founder Dependency | The degree to which revenue, delivery, and decisions require the founder personally. |
| Growth Decision | The structured evaluation that answers: should this business pursue this opportunity now? |
| Shade | A private implementation guide for a particular Revenue Model. Example: the Subscription Shade is your private implementation guide for building a subscription Revenue Model. |
| Executive Briefing | The member's current readout: what changed, what deserves attention, what should happen next, what should wait. |
| Revenue Intelligence | The ongoing observation layer that watches where revenue gets stuck and when conditions suggest a new decision. |
The decision philosophy
Business growth should be evaluated before it is executed. You do not begin by asking which revenue stream could make more money. You begin by asking what kind of business would be required to support it.
We call that future operating model The Business They Must Become™: the business your chosen move will require you to run.
Every evaluation weighs the same four dimensions: Capacity (can the business absorb this?), Strategic Sequencing (does this belong now?), Founder Agency (does this increase the founder's freedom, clarity, and ownership?), and Enterprise Value (does this build value beyond the founder's labor?). Together they form The Growth Decision Framework™.
The Five Places Revenue Gets Stuck™
Our public teaching framework for finding money that is delayed, lost, underused, or trapped inside a business: Missed Opportunity Revenue, Dormant Customer Revenue, Conversion Leakage, Operational Bottlenecks, and Expertise Bottlenecks. Inside the Membership, Revenue Intelligence uses the same lens to surface observations for your Executive Briefing.
How recommendations are governed
Recommendations come from governed, versioned business rules. AI organizes information, detects contradictions, and explains reasoning; it does not invent options, override eligibility rules, or make the decision. Every recommendation states what was evaluated, why the result holds, the assumptions underneath it, and one of five plain confidence states: strong fit; good fit with conditions; possible fit, more information needed; not ready yet; or poor fit for the desired business.
Two things are never for sale: our scoring and our recommendations. When a marketplace of tools and professionals exists, commercial relationships will be disclosed and will never alter what we recommend. Where a move touches legal, tax, clinical, or regulatory territory, we flag it for licensed professional review.
The Directory shows the possibilities. The Membership determines what belongs next. The final decision remains yours.
How Directory records state evidence
Every Revenue Model record carries an evidence tier. Stated means figures come from named, published sources. Benchmarked means figures reflect published market benchmarks for comparable offers. Modeled means figures are estimates built from stated assumptions. Ranges illustrate how a model prices. They are not predictions of your results, and no record promises income.
See the method applied to your business.
The Membership begins with The Growth Decision, evaluated exactly as described here.