Twenty years inside the customer base

Natalie McCrae founded Keystone Consulting in 2011 and spent twenty years building customer behaviour analytics for listed businesses across the UK, Europe, and Africa.

The methodology behind Keystone IQ was developed inside that practice, working at individual customer level in live commercial environments where the consequences of getting the customer base wrong were immediate – and consequential. It gave management teams a clear view of what revenue was really made up of, which relationships were durable, and how the customer base was moving beneath the headline numbers.

That work addressed the same underlying questions that matter in acquisition, ownership, and exit: where is the value concentrated, how resilient is it, and what is already changing.

She has watched cohort models miss the signal. She has seen order value inflation mask deteriorating frequency for quarters before the revenue line broke. She has sat in board meetings where “retention is 70%” was treated as good news – while the composition of the retained base was quietly weakening.

Keystone IQ was built to bring that lens to the private capital world: a way of understanding the customer base at asset level, with greater precision around value, durability and trajectory at the moments when important decisions are being made.