Forthcoming. This describes where the Scale practice is going rather than what runs today. We are building toward it deliberately, and we would rather show you the destination than imply we are already there.
The five-minute retro
Every time you close a deal, someone answers three questions. It takes five minutes and it is the foundation of everything else here.
Where did this customer first encounter anything we produced. Which specific piece most clearly prompted them to reach out. What was the final step before they signed.
That is it. Recorded in your CRM at intake or close, cross-checked by us monthly.
Why this instead of attribution modeling
Multi-touch attribution exists to find signal in populations too large to ask individually. When the population is small enough to ask, asking is more accurate, far cheaper to maintain, and produces something a model never does—the actual sentence the customer used about why they got in touch, which frequently turns out to be more useful than the attribution itself.
What we compute
Once the baseline has closed, quarterly, per partner.
What it costs to add a genuinely engaged contact. What it costs to produce a discovery conversation. What it costs to produce a closed customer. What a customer is worth over their life, using your revenue and tenure figures. And the ratio between those last two.
Each is a straightforward division rather than a model. Our fee and any spend over the outcome. Nothing more sophisticated than that, deliberately.
The trend, not the number
None of these numbers are exactly right, and we will say so rather than implying a precision we do not have.
What they are is consistently computed, which makes the direction trustworthy even when the absolute figure is not. A cost-to-value ratio moving from three to five across four quarters is a strong signal about whether the machine is improving. The same ratio quoted to two decimal places in a single quarter is a number pretending to be a finding.
What we need from you
The two inputs only you have: what a customer is worth and how long they stay. We cannot derive these and a guess makes everything downstream fiction.
And the retro discipline. Three fields, at close, most of the time. Where those fields are empty more often than not, this section degrades to guesswork, and it is the most common reason a partnership reaches month nine without being able to answer the question it most wants answered.
Where this shows up
In your thesis, which built its math on exactly these inputs, and in the quarterly audit that checks the math against what actually happened.
