The goodwill question
Download our deal team reference card, The goodwill question: What customer evidence resolves at every deal stage. Most goodwill is asserted, not evidenced. This shows what the difference looks like.
Download reference card →Where customer movement becomes investment intelligence
The compositional risks the management team is not flagging, surfaced before they show up in revenue.
A comprehensive year-on-year analysis of behavioural movement across the full customer base, with 12-month forward scenario projections. For operating partners managing hold-period value creation, and sponsors building the evidence layer for exit.
What You Get
What the Diagnostic delivers
The Diagnostic answers the question that Health Checks surface but cannot fully resolve: how is the customer base moving over time, and what does that movement mean for the investment thesis?
Cohort movement
Year-on-year movement across the full customer base - which cohorts are growing, which are deteriorating, and how fast the composition is shifting beneath the revenue line.
Observed behaviour
12 to 48 months of observed customer movement - not modelled projections from a single snapshot.
Forward revenue scenarios
What the base delivers if nothing changes, if you intervene on the highest-value at-risk customers, and if you develop the next tier - each number traceable back to specific customer populations.
Revenue Quality assessment
What proportion of current revenue is structurally durable versus already migrating toward attrition.
Value creation levers
The specific customer populations where the largest addressable revenue opportunities sit - and what moving them is worth.
Financial bridge
Customer movement translated into revenue range inputs for the financial model.
Refreshed Data Runs
The analysis re-run monthly as standard, so customer scores stay current and movement is tracked period by period rather than captured once. Cadence can be adjusted at scoping for businesses on a quarterly or different reporting rhythm, and feeds management reporting, operating reviews, board packs and CRM.
Format: Comprehensive written report with full visualisation suite. Presented in a 90-minute executive walkthrough with the operating partner or sponsor team.
Two use cases
For operating partners - hold period
The questions that matter during the hold are different from the questions at entry. Is the customer base composition shifting in ways the management team is not flagging? Are the value creation levers in the original 100-day plan still the right ones? Is the revenue line accelerating or decelerating in ways that aggregate KPIs hide?
The Diagnostic answers these questions on observed data, not projections. It tracks 12 to 48 months of value migration between cohorts, surfaces compositional risks before they show up in revenue, and identifies operating levers the management team has not yet pulled.
OC&C with Gain.pro report that revenue growth drives 56 to 70% of enterprise value uplift across exited deals. Customer-base improvement is the most direct expression of that lever. The Diagnostic sits at the centre of the largest budget pool in the PE lifecycle.
For exit-stage sponsors
Exits are harder to clear than at any point in the last decade. Distributions as a percentage of NAV have held below 15% for four consecutive years, and buy-side and sell-side valuation gaps are wide.
The Diagnostic produces the customer base evidence layer that makes the equity story defensible. Buyer questions on customer concentration, cohort quality, churn trajectory and revenue durability are answered in the data room before they are tabled in the deal process.
Commission four to six months before going to market, or in response to buyer challenges during the sale process.
Product summary
Price
Scoped to complexity and data volume
Duration
Approximately 10 days from clean data to delivery
Deal moment
Mid-hold strategic review, or four to six months before going to market at exit
Output
Year-on-year cohort movement analysis with 12-month forward scenario projections producing three named revenue range outcomes for the customer base.
Data required
Anonymised transaction extract covering 12 to 48 months. No PII.
Presentation
90-minute executive walkthrough with operating partner or sponsor team.
FAQs
A structured analysis of how a customer base has behaved over time, built from transaction data rather than management reporting. It tracks cohort movement, value migration and retention quality to produce a clear picture of what the revenue line is made of and where it is heading.
The Health Check is a focused, five-day screening tool that provides a directional read on customer-base health. The Diagnostic is a comprehensive two-week engagement that maps year-on-year movement, builds forward scenario projections, and identifies specific value creation levers. Most clients commission a Health Check first during deal screening, then upgrade to the Diagnostic post-acquisition or when full depth is needed at entry.
Yes. The Diagnostic report is designed to serve as an evidence layer alongside the financial model. The scenario projections and distributional analysis provide the kind of auditable, assumption-transparent documentation that buyers and their advisors can interrogate directly.
Based on observed behavioural trajectories over 12 to 48 months, we project three scenarios for how the customer base is likely to evolve over the next 12 months: what the base delivers if nothing changes, if you intervene on the highest-value at-risk customers, and if you develop the next tier. Each scenario includes a revenue range and the specific customer populations underpinning it. This is not a forecast. It is a structured range of outcomes based on observed patterns.
Theta uses an assumed Pareto/NBD probability model calibrated to aggregate purchase data. Keystone IQ uses distributional analysis across observed individual-level transaction data over 12 to 48 months. Our approach does not assume a distribution shape - it observes the actual distribution and tracks how it moves. The operator interpretation layer, knowing what a movement pattern means for the thesis, is a further structural difference.
Data quality issues are identified and resolved during the ingestion phase, not after delivery. If data quality is insufficient to support a credible Diagnostic, we will tell you at the scoping stage - before any fees are committed.
Both. Operating partners commission directly for hold-period reviews. Some engagements are commissioned through the fund's deal team or portfolio operations function. We are flexible on contracting structure.
You start four to six months before going to market. The goal is to answer the questions an incoming buyer will ask before they ask them: customer concentration, churn trajectory, cohort quality, revenue durability. Evidence prepared in advance becomes a data room asset. Evidence assembled under pressure becomes a liability.
As often as the business needs. The analysis is built to be re-run on your reporting cadence, whether that is monthly, quarterly or aligned to board and operating reviews, so customer scores stay current and progress against the value creation objectives is tracked period by period. The cadence is agreed at scoping.
The Map defines the value creation levers and customer objectives. The Diagnostic tracks how the base moves against them over time, with year-on-year movement and forward scenarios. Commission the Map to set the agenda, then the Diagnostic to monitor delivery through the hold.
The Diagnostic is the evidence. Value Creation Advisory, delivered by Keystone Partners, is the execution. Where the Diagnostic shows what the customer base needs, Keystone Partners embeds with management to drive the customer objectives through the business until the numbers move.
No. We work with anonymised extracts from the systems you already have, your CRM, ecommerce, billing or POS data. There is no platform to buy and no transformation project to run. The outputs feed back into your existing management reporting and CRM.
Yes. Customer scores and movement are designed to drop into management reporting, operating reviews, board packs and CRM, so the customer view sits alongside the numbers the business already runs on rather than in a separate tool.
Commission the diagnostic
Approximately 10 days from clean data. Fixed scope. No PII required.
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