Who it is for
Established, owner-led, and performing below potential.
The Commercial Assessment is built for established owner-led businesses with a credible revenue base, a capable team, and a gap between what the business is and what it should be. It is the entry point to every APG engagement, and it stands alone: you can act on the findings yourself, with your existing advisers, or with us.
It is usually triggered by one of a few recognisable situations:
- Revenue is growing but profit is not keeping pace, and nobody can point to exactly why.
- The plan is to sell or step back within a few years, and the honest question is what a buyer would find.
- The business depends too heavily on the owner to scale, hand over, or step back from safely.
- Priorities keep being set, but when results arrive in the P&L nobody can say what drove them.
- An accountant, broker or adviser has said the numbers look fine but something underneath does not.
- Growth has stalled, and the usual explanations (market, team, effort) do not hold up.
What we examine
Six lenses on one reconciled financial foundation.
The assessment is a structured diagnostic, not an interview series. Each lens reads a different source of value, and their agreement and divergence is computed and shown.
Diagnostic
A health read across every function, scored independently by you and by us. The gaps between the two scores become part of the evidence.
Critical Success Factors
The few conditions that must hold for a business to win in your specific sector.
Value Chain
Where margin is created and lost, activity by activity.
Value Engine
The operating drivers (price, mix, capacity, productivity, retention) and how each links to EBITDA.
Go-to-Market
Segments, channels, pipeline and conversion: where demand comes from and what it costs.
Market & Competition
Sector demand, competitive position and whitespace.
Across the engagement we examine:
- Your financial baseline, synced directly from your ledger and reconciled before any lens reads against it
- Commercial performance: revenue and margin by product, customer and channel
- Operations: capacity, delivery cost, rework and utilisation
- People and leadership: accountability, decision rights, owner dependency
- Systems and visibility: whether the numbers leadership sees can be trusted
- Owner alignment: what you actually want, and whether the business is being run toward it
Every finding lands in one observation register: sourced, quantified, corroborated across lenses, and deduplicated. Advice you can audit.
What you receive
A precise picture, a sized opportunity, a clear next step.
The Diagnostic Report
A live, secure link assembled from the engagement data itself: the six-lens read, the observation register, and the prioritised findings. Always current, with print-quality export for the boardroom.
Quantified opportunity ranges
Evidence patterns consolidated into opportunity pools with an initial value envelope. Committed, risk-adjusted value cases come later, for the initiatives that proceed. We do not promise committed value from an assessment alone.
A recommended pathway
What should happen first, what should wait, and what should simply be monitored. Ranked against value, confidence, cost, capacity and risk.
What we need from you
Light on your time. Honest with your data.
- Read access to your accounting ledger and core commercial data
- A completed self-assessment from you and your key leaders
- Two to three working sessions with the owner and leadership
- Honest answers, including on the uncomfortable subjects
The model works when the owner is prepared to look at what the data shows, including the things that are uncomfortable. If the goal is confirmation of what you already believe, we are not the right fit.
Boundaries
What a Commercial Assessment is not.
Not due diligence
We assess for the owner's benefit, not a buyer's. Though it will show you what a buyer's diligence would find.
Not a business valuation
We quantify what drives and constrains value. We do not issue a valuation opinion.
Not accounting or tax advice
Your accountant remains your accountant. We work on the operating causes behind the numbers.
Not compliance consulting
Regulatory and audit readiness are their own disciplines. We assess their commercial consequences, not their technical detail.
Not a facilitated strategy workshop
We do not reflect the room's consensus back at it. The findings are ours, from the evidence.
Not a generic operational review
Every observation is quantified and traced to cash, EBITDA or enterprise value. Not a list of tidy-ups.
What happens after
Assess, then decide.
The assessment closes with a working session on the findings and the recommended pathway. From there, three doors are open: act on the findings yourself; take them to your existing advisers; or continue with APG into Performance Architecture, where chosen opportunities become valued, owned execution commitments inside the APG Platform.
Whichever door you choose, you keep the evidence base. Want to see how a finding becomes a committed number? Walk through a worked example.
The next step is a conversation.
Forty-five minutes, no preparation required. We will tell you directly whether an assessment makes sense for your situation, and what it would examine first.
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