Seven questions.
One honest answer.

Before we can say anything useful, we need to understand who we are looking at. What they do, who they serve, and how they describe themselves.

We read the live website - not a cached version, the actual page right now - and figure out the business category, the target customer, the operating model, and whether the way they describe themselves is clear and consistent. A business that cannot be clearly identified cannot be accurately evaluated. Everything downstream depends on getting this right.

Understanding a business in isolation is not enough. We need to understand how they position themselves relative to everyone else competing for the same customers.

We look for signs of genuine differentiation - not just whether they claim to be different, but whether the way they communicate actually draws a clear line between them and their competitors. We evaluate how clearly they define the problem they solve, who they solve it for, and whether a buyer encountering them for the first time would understand why this business and not another.

The tools a business uses tell you a great deal about how they operate - and what they are probably missing.

We detect the technology running behind the scenes: the CRM, the analytics platform, the marketing tools, the customer support system, the payment infrastructure. Each tool is a data point about how the business is structured. We look at how well those tools connect with each other, where the gaps are, and what those gaps probably mean for their ability to understand their own business.

Before anyone reaches out to a business, they look for proof that other people have trusted it. We evaluate how much of that proof is visible and how credible it is.

We look at the social proof present on the site - case studies, testimonials, reviews, certifications, press mentions. We evaluate not just whether proof exists but whether it is specific enough to be convincing. A testimonial that says "great service" does not do the same work as a named case study with a documented outcome. We score the depth and specificity of what is there.

A business can only make good decisions based on what it actually measures. Most businesses are measuring far less than they think.

Using what we know about their technology stack, we map out what data they are likely collecting and what they are almost certainly missing. We cross-reference against a comprehensive field registry covering every type of data a business at this stage should have. The gaps we find are not just technical observations - they are the reason certain business questions cannot be answered, certain patterns cannot be seen, certain decisions cannot be made with confidence.

Knowing what is missing is only useful if you know what to do about it. This pass turns the findings into matched recommendations.

We take everything from the previous five passes - the gaps, the category, the maturity level, the technology already in place - and match them against a catalog of over three thousand services, each scored for fit. The recommendations are not generic. They are specific to this business at this stage, ranked by how closely they address what we actually found.

The final pass brings everything together into a single score and a sequenced action plan.

We apply a set of validation checks across all six passes. Certain conditions - like an unresolved business identity or a critical data quality failure - affect the confidence we can place in the overall assessment. These adjustments are always visible. You can see exactly what fired, what it adjusted, and why. The final score is not a black box. It is the product of everything that came before it, with every step accounted for.