What does the growth diagnostic actually ask us for, and how long does it take?

Most diagnostics ask you what you think. Ours asks you what happened. That difference is the whole design.

A typical agency self-assessment asks questions like "How strong is your new business capability?" and offers a one to five scale. The problem is obvious: every leadership team rates itself a four. The results flatter, nothing changes, and the exercise is forgotten by Friday. Opinion-based diagnostics measure confidence, not condition. Agencies are full of confident people. That is rather the point of agencies.

So the growth diagnostic is built on three principles.

First, evidence over opinion. Instead of asking how good your pipeline is, we ask how many qualified opportunities entered it in the last 12 months, how many you won, and where they came from. Instead of asking whether clients grow with you, we ask what your top five accounts billed two years ago and what they bill now. Numbers are harder to flatter.

Second, bounded recall. Every question is anchored to a defined window: the last 90 days, the last 12 months, the last 24 months. "Recently" and "usually" are where self-deception lives, so we do not use them.

Third, honesty about measurement gaps. Where you do not track something, "we don't measure this" is a legitimate answer, and it is scored, because non-measurement is itself a signal. An agency that cannot say what its win rate is has told us something important about its growth system. There is no penalty for honesty and no reward for guessing, because the scoring can tell the difference.

What should you have to hand? Broadly: new business records for the last year or two, revenue by client over time, and whatever pipeline or CRM data you keep. If your data is patchy, complete it anyway. Patchy data is a finding, not a failure, and it is far better surfaced in a diagnostic than in a buyer's due diligence.