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We review how the business creates, loses and could improve value (across revenue, pricing, margins, cost-to-serve, capacity, demand, customer economics, competition and risk) and produce a decision-focused view of what constrains performance.
These are the situations that bring executives here: select the ones you recognise.
Select the symptoms you recognise to see where an audit would start.
The Business Economics Diagnostic is the broad entry point to our economics work, for leadership teams who suspect commercial performance could be stronger but cannot yet tell whether the root cause is pricing, profitability, demand, scale, business model or risk. It is deliberately not an accounting exercise. The diagnostic produces a decision-focused current-state view: what the evidence already shows, what it cannot yet show, and which questions deserve deeper analysis, with nothing presented at more precision than the data supports.
How revenue is structured and earned, and whether pricing captures the value the business creates: architecture, discounting and monetisation.
The output is deliberately a set of determinations, not a pile of analysis.
The handful of economic questions that actually determine performance, separated from the noise that fills most reporting.
The evidence-gap register: what the business cannot currently answer, and what it would take (data, instrumentation or analysis) to answer it.
What the existing evidence already supports, stated with its confidence level rather than dressed up as certainty.
Which deeper analysis is worth commissioning next and, just as deliberately, which is not.
A prioritised, costed roadmap you own, build with us or without us.
Six stages, ending in a working session, not a document drop.
We agree the commercial decisions the diagnostic must inform (investment, pricing, growth, capacity) because a diagnostic without a decision attached produces a report, not progress.
We work from what already exists: management accounts, board packs, pricing files, pipeline and sales data. No new data collection is required to begin, and nothing is uploaded to a platform.
We interview the executives and operators closest to revenue, cost, capacity and customers, and pay particular attention where their explanations diverge.
We build a high-level model of the economics, with every figure labelled as a measured fact, an estimate, an assumption or a proxy, and ranges where granular data does not exist.
Findings from finance, sales, operations and marketing are reconciled into one driver and constraint map, so the explanation holds across the whole business rather than one department.
The diagnostic ends in a working session: we walk through the constraint map, the evidence gaps and the 30/60/90-day roadmap, and agree what happens next.
The roadmap routes each finding onward. The specialist streams it draws on (unit economics and profitability, pricing and monetisation, demand and growth economics, scale and capacity, business model and competitive strategy, and risk and scenario analysis) are scoped as follow-on engagements through the Business Economics practice.
Owns: economic baseline · driver & constraint mapping · evidence grading · specialist routing.
The constraint is named and needs deeper commercial analysis.
Unit economics, pricing, margin and commercial decision analysis.
The diagnostic defines the scope; the economics practice runs the deep analysis.
Payment Processing Cost Reduction. An ecommerce retailer was losing a significant percentage of revenue to payment processing and invoice platform fees. Web Lifter redesigned the entire sales and payment workflow, replacing Stripe and Paycove with a direct Westpac PayWay integration and a custom-built invoicing platform. The new architecture reduced transaction costs, streamlined operations, and delivered immediate profit improvements without requiring any increase in sales volume.
Read the case“We can't recommend Web Lifter highly enough … a digital partner who could understand our operations, connect the dots between marketing and backend systems, and deliver real results.”
Accounting explains what happened, to a compliance standard. The diagnostic asks a different question: what is driving performance, where is value leaking and what should be analysed next. It works alongside your finance function. Most of the inputs come from the reporting they already produce.
No. It is not an audit in the accounting sense and carries no assurance opinion. The diagnostic sits deliberately outside accounting, tax, valuation, formal audit, insolvency and regulated financial advice.
Yes. The diagnostic produces decisions, not just findings, and it needs an owner with the authority to act on them. Engagements without a sponsor tend to produce reports that get filed.
It is built to avoid exactly that. Every domain reviewed is tied to a live commercial decision, the modelling stays at the level the decision needs, and the engagement ends in a leadership workshop rather than a document drop.
It is expected. Every figure in the diagnostic is labelled as a measured fact, an estimate, an assumption or a proxy, and where granular data does not exist, we work in ranges rather than inventing precision. The evidence-gap register turns what is missing into a plan, not an excuse.
No preset answer survives the diagnostic. Pricing is one of twelve domains reviewed, and the point of the exercise is to find which domain actually constrains performance. It is often not the one management first suspected.
An economic baseline, a commercial driver and constraint map, leakage hypotheses, an evidence-gap register, initial analyses where the data supports them, a risk and opportunity matrix, specialist analysis recommendations and a 30/60/90-day roadmap, walked through in a leadership workshop.
The list of commercially important questions the business cannot currently answer, with what it would take to answer each: data, instrumentation or analysis. It stops the roadmap resting on guesses, and makes the next investment in evidence deliberate.
The roadmap names which specialist analysis is worth commissioning next: unit economics and profitability, pricing and monetisation, demand and growth economics, scale and capacity, business model and competitive strategy, or risk and scenario analysis. That deeper work runs through our Business Economics consulting practice, with its scope defined by the diagnostic.
Scope depends on the complexity of the business (how many offers, segments and entities are in play) and is confirmed on a short scoping call. The diagnostic is fixed-scope: the deliverables are defined before it starts, and no financial-data uploads or platform accounts are required.
The flagship audit looks across the whole business system: economics, growth, operations, data and technology. The diagnostic goes deep on economics alone. If the constraint is clearly commercial (profit, pricing, demand, scale), start here; if it could sit anywhere in the system, start with the flagship.