Services · Customer Base Diagnostic
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?
Year-on-year movement across the full customer base - which segments are growing, which are deteriorating, and how fast the composition is shifting beneath the revenue line.
12 to 48 months of observed customer movement - not modelled projections from a single snapshot.
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.
What proportion of current revenue is structurally durable versus already migrating toward attrition.
The specific customer populations where the largest addressable revenue opportunities sit - and what moving them is worth.
Customer movement translated into revenue range inputs for the financial model.
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 segments, surfaces compositional risks before they show up in revenue, and identifies operating levers the management team has not yet pulled.
Bain reports that revenue growth drives 71% of PE exit value creation. Customer-base improvement is the most direct expression of that lever.
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 |
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 cardFAQs
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.
You start twelve to eighteen 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.
Commission the Diagnostic
Approximately 10 days from clean data. Fixed scope. No PII required.
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