The deck says the motion is repeatable. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it is founder heroics and one channel that has not broken yet. I read growth for a living, from inside the CMO seat, and I do two things for fund managers: a diligence read on growth durability, and embedded GTM leadership inside a portfolio company.
Most fund relationships start in the first lane. It attaches to a deal or a portfolio company you are already thinking about, and it is a bounded way to see how I work.
A written assessment of growth durability: whether the revenue engine survives contact with the next stage of scale, or depends on things that do not. The same six-dimension diagnostic I run inside operating engagements, reframed as an investment risk read.
It ends in a document you can circulate internally and a working session to pressure-test it. Not size-bound: the read works the same on a $60M portco as a $6M one.
A fractional CMO seat inside a portfolio company from roughly $2M ARR: usually one with a founder-dependent pipeline and no senior marketing leadership. Diagnose the constraint, build the operating system, run it, then help the company hire its full-time owner.
The engagement is designed to end in a hire, not a dependency, which is usually what the board wanted in the first place.
See the full method →The last ten closed-won deals against the stated ICP, and where churn concentrates. A book of custom snowflakes is a scaling problem priced as a growth story.
Whether the positioning is differentiated or category-generic, and whether sales uses the messaging or freestyles because it does not land.
Attributed pipeline per channel versus what leadership believes, and whether any channel is single-threaded. If the biggest one stopped tomorrow, what happens to the forecast?
Stage-by-stage conversion and velocity, and whether recent growth was bought at worsening unit math that the topline hides.
Pricing, packaging, and expansion mechanics. When a company is spending more and converting less, the product marketing layer underneath is usually why.
Team, tools, and operating cadence. The gap between the plan in the board deck and the capacity to execute it rarely appears as a risk line in a model. It should.
The output is a position, not a survey. Each dimension gets a signal, the findings roll up to the single biggest risk to growth durability, and the working session is where you push back on it.
A pre-close read works from the data room and management sessions. A post-close read with CRM access goes materially deeper: real conversion data, real attribution, real cohorts instead of management's summary of them.
The assessment says which is which, and names the questions the available data could not answer. Turnaround is two to three weeks from data access, scoped in the first call.
The practice is intentionally small: three to four clients at a time, no bench, no juniors. For diligence, that is the point. The person reading the CRM is the person who ran one, owned the number through a Series A and B, and sat in the board meetings where the growth story got interrogated.
My foundation is product marketing: who the product is for, why it is different, what it is worth. Most growth problems that look like demand problems live there, which is why a media-plan audit misses them and an operator's read does not.
I run a conflict check before touching anything, and if the read comes back ugly, you get the ugly version. A diligence product is only worth buying from someone willing to kill the deal.
Not an RFP. A 30-minute call about what you need to know and by when. If the read fits, I scope it to your question rather than a template, and I will say so if it does not fit: a wrong-fit engagement costs you a deal clock and me a reference.
Pricing is scoped on that call. Diligence is priced to the question and the access; portfolio engagements follow the structure on the main site.
Book 30 minutes, or forward this page to the partner who owns the question.
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