Your marketing may not be the problem.

Before you spend more on sales, marketing or lead generation, check that the foundations underneath them are not quietly capping your growth. Seven questions. Two minutes. Your score on the screen the moment you finish.

FreeNo sign-up to see your scoreScored across 7 foundations

7Foundations

What this measures

Seven foundations, in the order they have to be built.

Most founders never properly validate their market, their positioning, their value proposition or their product-market fit. Then they spend on marketing to fix a problem marketing was never going to fix. These seven are the order I work in, because each one rests on the one before it.

One

Business Purpose & Direction

A clear purpose creates momentum, alignment and resilience. Without purpose, vision, mission and values, everything that follows becomes guesswork.

Two

Business Hypothesis

Not a business plan. Your initial articulation of the start-up, the scale-up idea or the pivot, written down and ready to test.

Three

Target Markets

Trying to sell without knowing your target market creates wasted marketing spend and confused prospects.

Four

Ideal Customer Profile & Personas

High-growth businesses understand their personas: their needs, fears, motivations and triggers. Above all, their problems.

Five

Value Proposition

Most founders struggle here. It has to be specific, relevant and instantly understandable, and it has to solve the buyer's need.

Six

Product Market Fit

This is where most failures happen. Discovery conversations are essential before you invest in marketing or sales.

Seven

Go To Market

If the earlier foundations are weak, your go-to-market will fail, no matter how much you spend on it.

What you walk away with

Three things you will not get from another opinion.

Where your growth strategy is built on sand, and where it is not. Named, scored and in front of you.

Which of the seven foundations is most likely to stall or derail your next stage of growth.

The two or three priority actions worth your next ninety days, rather than a list of twenty.

In their words

People who have been through these foundations.

As a fellow founder on the London Mayor’s International Business Programme, Zed helped me curate my thoughts and a business hypothesis aligned to my values, and navigated me through essential product-market fit exercises.

Naheed AfzalCEO, Contracts IT Limited

Zed was instrumental in helping me understand how to ideate my scaling, prepare a revised hypothesis and product-market fit. This foundation led to the business commercialising optimally, reviewing sales process, product, pricing and offer.

Cara de LangeFounder & CEO, Softer Success

His Business Growth Foundations programme took me from jumbled ideas to a clear product-market fit and a real go-to-market plan. Knowing what to do and actually doing it are very different things. Here Zed made a world of difference.

James BebbingtonGrowth Strategy Consultant & Fractional Commercial Director

Who is behind this

I built this from the questions I ask in the first meeting.

Thirty years of building, running and rescuing businesses, as a fractional and interim chief executive, a commercial director and a non-executive director. The seven foundations are the sequence I have watched hold businesses up, and watched their absence quietly take them down.

Your score is yours. If you want to argue with it, or work out what to do about it, that conversation is free and there is no pitch at the end of it.

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Diagnosis is not delivery. But you cannot deliver what you have never properly diagnosed.