Decide where growth creates value before committing capital and capacity.

No: the stakes are often highest for mid-sized businesses, where one wrong expansion can strain the whole company. The analysis scales to the decision: a second-location decision is a focused engagement, a portfolio of candidate markets is a larger one.

Usually not first. The readiness review exists exactly for this: if the core's economics or capacity can't fund and staff an expansion, the honest recommendation is to strengthen the core, and if the pressure is acute, Performance & Turnaround Economics is the better starting point.

Evidence is graded, not pooled. Paid behaviour (actual purchases, deposits, signed intent) ranks highest; observed behaviour and pipeline data next; stated interest from surveys and conversations below that; and market-size arithmetic lowest of all. An option built mostly on the bottom layers doesn't fail automatically, but the gates will require it to earn better evidence before real capital moves.

That finding shapes the roadmap rather than stopping it. Missing evidence becomes the explicit purpose of the validation and pilot stages, each designed to buy the specific evidence the decision needs at the lowest cost. What we won't do is fill the gap with false precision.

The burden of proof. A reversible option (a channel trial you can wind down, a pilot cohort) can proceed on moderate evidence because the downside is bounded. An irreversible one (a long lease, a franchise agreement, a brand commitment) must clear a much higher evidence threshold. Classifying options this way stops the biggest bets being made on the thinnest proof.

A pre-agreed checkpoint where the option must show specific evidence before more capital and attention are committed. The thresholds are set before results exist, which is the entire point, because thresholds negotiated after the numbers arrive always bend towards the sunk cost.

It slows commitment, not learning: validation and pilots are designed to run fast precisely because exposure is small. What gates prevent is the expensive kind of speed: scaling an option before its economics are proven, then spending years unwinding it.

You do. The framework defines the evidence and thresholds; the expand, hold or exit call stays with your leadership, made on the record against criteria everyone agreed to in advance. Our role is keeping the evidence honest.

An opportunity portfolio map, a commercial model per option, a capacity and capability summary, investment and payback analysis, cannibalisation analysis, a prioritised sequence and a stage-gate trigger framework, walked through with the leadership team, decision by decision.

The diagnostic is the broad entry point when the constraint could be anywhere in the economics: pricing, profitability, capacity, demand. Come straight here when the question is specifically where and how to grow. If the diagnostic runs first, its findings become the readiness baseline this work builds on.