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At a glance
- Day 1 to 3: access, eight-category inventory, first interviews. Day 4 to 8: the scan. Day 9 to 11: ratio restatement. Day 12 to 14: Three-Path Model and readout.
- Client time during the two weeks is usually 3 to 5 hours in week one and 6 to 8 hours in week two. The rest runs offline.
- By day 14 the company has cash recovered, numbers restated, and one Keep/Kill/Restructure decision on paper ready for the next board vote.
What happens on Day 1?
Day 1 is access and inventory. Three things have to land in the first 24 hours:
- Read-only access to the accounting ledger, SaaS admin consoles, cloud billing portal, AR aging, and the current vendor list.
- A 30-minute conversation with the CEO and the finance lead to map the last four board decks, the current raise posture, and the decisions that have been sitting open for more than one quarter.
- An hour with the finance lead alone to walk the chart of accounts and confirm the definition of customer currently being used in the monthly reporting.
Nothing is touched without a clean access trail. Every pull is logged. The engagement contract includes the scope of read-only access and the removal date when the engagement ends.
What happens Day 2 to Day 3?
Day 2 and 3 are the eight-category inventory. One engineer on the team runs the cloud-billing scan and the SaaS-subscription pull. A second runs the R&D tax credit pre-read against the last three years of returns. A third runs AR aging and vendor terms. Finance runs headcount, contractor, and G&A extracts.
By end of Day 3 the team has a one-page inventory for each of the eight categories. Nothing is acted on yet. The point of the inventory is to have a single view of where every dollar could be in one of the eight buckets, so the scan in Days 4-8 can be dollarized and prioritized.
What happens Day 4 to Day 8?
This is the week of the scan. The eight categories get worked in order of expected recovery and risk.
- SaaS subscription overages and duplicated tools: usually the fastest recovery. Found, documented, terminations or downgrades staged for client approval.
- Cloud infrastructure: committed-use gaps, reserved instance holes, right-sizing misses. Recoverable; work continues into Day 7.
- R&D tax credits: the highest-dollar category on most engagements. Current-year estimate and amended-return potential for the last three years.
- AR aging: accounts past 60 days surfaced with aging detail. Usually a finance lead and a commercial lead run this together for three hours on Day 6.
- Vendor terms: auto-renewal dates, missed net-60 opportunities, contract terms the company is paying for and not using.
- Revenue leakage: pricing pages vs. actual invoicing, plan changes that never got billed, discounts applied past their expiration.
- Headcount and contractor load: not a layoff pass. A review of contractor engagements that were supposed to end, seats that went unfilled and stayed in the budget, and role overlaps.
- G&A overhead: office, travel, tooling, legal retainers. The smallest category by dollar in most scans, but the fastest to clean up.
By end of Day 8 the team has a single schedule of recoverable dollars, by category, with a status for each item: recovered, queued, requires client decision.
What happens Day 9 to Day 11?
The second half of the engagement pivots from cash to decisions. The ratio mirage fix happens in this window.
Day 9: Customer definition conversation with finance and commercial leadership. One explicit definition gets chosen. Every downstream ratio will be recalculated against it.
Day 10: Ratio restatement. Gross margin, LTV/CAC, and net revenue retention recalculated against the chosen definition and broken into cohorts (pre-18-months vs. current). The restated numbers are circulated to the CEO and CFO for review.
Day 11: Delta summary. A one-page document shows the reported vs. restated numbers with the drivers of the gap. This is almost always the hardest conversation of the engagement. Most CEOs read the delta summary twice before they believe the restated numbers are the right ones.
What happens Day 12 to Day 14?
The last three days are the Three-Path Model and the readout.
Day 12: The team works with the CEO to identify which single decision is quietly driving the most drift. Usually the go-to-market motion, a priced product line, or a senior hire. One decision, named, scoped.
Day 13: The Three-Path Model gets drafted. Keep, Kill, Restructure. Dollars under each path on incremental ARR, incremental burn, and 12-month net cash. A recommendation from the team, with reasoning.
Day 14: Readout. A 90-minute session with the CEO, CFO, and optionally the lead investor. Three outputs on the table: the recovered-cash schedule, the restated ratios, and the Three-Path Model.
What does the client see at the end of Day 14?
Three deliverables, each one page or close to it.
- Cash Recovery Schedule. A line-item view of every dollar recovered or queued across the eight categories. Always above $22,500 in our engagements. Most engagements clear $30K. Some clear far more.
- Restated Ratios Summary. Reported vs. restated gross margin, LTV/CAC, NRR. Driver notes for each gap. A single-page document.
- Three-Path Model. The first Keep/Kill/Restructure on the decision the company has been running by default.
Plus a 90-day recovery plan that names what the 90-Day Decision Resolution engagement would ship in months two and three if the client wants to continue. The client is not obligated to continue. About 70% do.
How much client time does this take?
Week one: 3 to 5 hours of CEO and finance-lead time, mostly in the first 48 hours for access and the initial conversations. The scan runs offline.
Week two: 6 to 8 hours. The customer-definition conversation, the restated-ratios review, the Three-Path Model workshop, and the readout. Heavier because the decisions in week two require the CEO’s judgment.
Fourteen days total. Nothing ships to the client’s calendar without a 48-hour heads-up.
Where to go from here
The Diagnostic is a fixed-fee engagement with a guaranteed floor of $22,500 to $30,000 in recovered capital in 14 days. If we miss, the fee refunds.
Read the guarantee Book the call
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