The PACED Review is a paid diagnostic for founders and revenue leaders who suspect where revenue is leaking but cannot prove it. The Review scores all five parts of a revenue engine against a company's own figures. The Review then names the single gate holding the others down, and states what that gate costs every year.
The PACED Review
When someone asks why revenue is behind, “we think it is the pipeline” is an answer that invites three more questions. The PACED Review gives you the one that ends them: which part of your revenue engine is holding the rest down, what it is costing you a year, and the evidence behind both.
Revenue does not arrive in one piece. It passes through five stages, and each one keeps a fraction of what reaches it. That matters more than it sounds, because those fractions multiply rather than average. A business that is strong in four places and weak in one does not perform slightly below average. It performs at the level of the weak one, because everything downstream only ever sees what the weak stage passed on.
This is why the symptom and the cause are so rarely in the same place. Deals stall at the close, so the close looks broken, when what actually happened is that conviction never formed in the person who signs. Customers churn at renewal, so retention looks broken, when the account was sold to the wrong buyer eleven months earlier. Fix the stage where the symptom shows and the number will not move, because you will have repaired something that was working.
The instrument exists to stop that happening. It finds the stage that is actually binding, before you spend a quarter on the one that hurts.
The terms, defined once
The five gates: Position, who the right buyer is and how to get their attention. Activate, how attention becomes a realistic revenue opportunity. Capture, how opportunities turn into cash. Embed, how the client gets value from the product daily. Develop, how clients stay and grow year over year.
Revenue Debt: the output a company forgoes, every cycle, to its single weakest gate. Stated as an equation, it is ARR × (Lifted Yield ÷ Current Yield − 1).
01
Forty questions across the five gates. Each one asks for the figure and for where the figure came from, so the answer survives someone asking “says who?” long after the call has ended.
02
Nothing here is scored automatically. A consultant reads every input and sets every figure by hand, which means the result cannot be improved by answering optimistically, and it can be argued with, which an algorithm cannot.
03
Where you do not have a number to hand, you say so plainly, and that gap is itself part of the diagnosis. A company that cannot measure its own close rate has learned something at question three.
One document. Everything in it is about your business, and every figure in it has a source attached.
| Your Yield | One number for the whole engine, gate by gate, multiplied rather than averaged. Usually lower than the dashboard implies. |
|---|---|
| The binding gate | The one stage holding the others down, named, with the specific fault inside it confirmed rather than guessed at. |
| The figure | What that gate costs you in revenue every year, worked out from your own ARR. |
| Where you were right, and where you were not | Question four asks what you think the problem is. The readout puts your answer next to the evidence. |
| What becomes binding next | The gate that takes over once the first is fixed, so the following move is known before you need it. |
| The evidence trail | The citations behind the finding, so it can be handed to an investor and defended without you in the room. |
The diagnosis is the same in all three. What changes is how far it gets carried.
01
The Review as described: the forty questions, scored by hand, and the readout. You leave knowing which gate is binding and what it costs. Two weeks. Most people start here, and a good number stop here, which is a legitimate outcome rather than a failed sale.
02
Everything in Diagnose, and we fill the forty questions in together in a working session rather than sending them to you. The fix for the binding gate is then written up as a build order: what gets built, in what sequence, who owns each piece, and the one measure that says it worked. You leave with a plan your team can run without us.
03
Everything in Prescribe, and we run it with you for ninety days against that one gate, weekly, until its number moves. Then it ends. Not a retainer, not an open-ended engagement, and not a relationship you have to extract yourself from later.
What each one costs depends on which you take. We will tell you on the call, before you commit to anything.
| Before | After | |
|---|---|---|
| What is broken | A theory, held with varying confidence by different people. | One gate, named, with the fault inside it confirmed. |
| The evidence | Impressions and a dashboard. | A figure per gate, each with its source attached. |
| What it costs | Nobody has worked it out. | An annual number, from your own ARR. |
| The investor answer | “We think it is the pipeline.” | “It is Capture, here is the evidence, and here is what it is worth.” |
| The next move | Whatever is loudest. | The binding gate, then the one that takes over from it. |
| Six months later | The same argument, with new numbers. | The same instrument, re-run, showing whether it moved. |
“Forensic and data-driven, working back from the numbers, not guessing. Exactly how it should be.”
Sources
A conversation first. We will tell you which of the three depths fits, and what it costs, before you commit to anything.