01 — Programme Outcome Map & Business Diagnostic
Programme: Investor Readiness
1. What you will learn
In this lesson you will learn to set ninety-day readiness outcomes that are entirely within your control, to budget the hours and the professional fees they require, and to run a diagnostic across the eight capabilities that decide whether your business survives verification.
2. The idea explained
Readiness is unusual among the subjects in this series in that almost every outcome is within your control. Nobody else decides whether your books reconcile or your contracts are signed. This makes outcome setting straightforward and removes the usual excuse.
Three outcomes are enough. One on evidence: your mock diligence supported score, from its starting point to a target. One on documents: your inventory score out of ten. One on numbers: your reconciliation gap, driven to zero and kept there.
The budget has two components that founders usually underestimate. The first is your own hours, which are smaller than in most programmes because much of the work is delegated. The second is professional fees, which are real: reconciling two years of books, a company secretary correcting a share position, and a lawyer confirming intellectual property assignments all cost money. Estimating them before starting prevents the common outcome where readiness stalls halfway because the next step has a fee attached and no budget behind it.
The diagnostic runs across eight capabilities. Financial reconciliation: do your quoted numbers tie to invoices and bank? Cap table integrity: does the table match the statutory records? Contract coverage: do your material relationships have signed agreements? Intellectual property ownership: does the company own what it depends on? Compliance currency: are registrations and filings current, with a calendar? Metrics reproducibility: can each number you quote be traced to source data by someone else? Disclosure preparedness: is there a written list of uncomfortable facts with prepared explanations? Key-person dependence: how much of the business exists only in your head, and what is being done about it?
Rate each from one to five on evidence. Two or below is a constraint.
The honest statement: none of this causes an investment. It removes the reasons an interested investor walks away, and it leaves a business that is easier to run, easier to lend to and easier to sell, whether or not anyone invests.
Apply it
3. How to apply it in your own business
Write the three outcomes with their starting values from your baseline, and their targets.
Estimate the professional fees each will require by asking your accountant and a lawyer for indicative figures before you commit, and add them together.
Run the diagnostic and give the first month to the two lowest, unless one of them is blocked by a third party, in which case start that one and work the next lowest meanwhile.
Worked example
4. Worked example
Rohan sets three outcomes. His mock diligence supported score moves from seven out of twenty to sixteen out of twenty. His document inventory moves from five out of ten to nine out of ten. His reconciliation gap moves from four per cent to zero.
He then works backwards from the mock diligence target. Nine additional questions must become evidenced. Grouping them, three depend on the reconciliation, two on the cap table, two on contracts, one on intellectual property and one on insurance.
He estimates the work behind each group. The reconciliation is mostly his accountant's time, with about six hours of his own gathering records. The cap table requires a company secretary and about four hours of his time including the conversation with the adviser. The contracts require about five hours of his own drafting and chasing. Intellectual property requires a lawyer and about three hours of his own. Insurance requires about four hours of comparing and buying.
His own time is therefore about twenty-two hours across the quarter, which is under two hours a week and entirely manageable.
The fees are the part he had not considered. He asks for indicative figures: the reconciliation and restatement, the company secretary's work, the legal confirmation and drafting of assignments, and the insurance premium. He records the total as a budget figure and confirms he can fund it from operating cash without touching anything else. Had he not asked, he would have discovered the fee at the point of committing and stalled, which is how most readiness projects die in month two.
His diagnostic scores financial reconciliation at two, cap table at two, contract coverage at three, intellectual property at one, compliance currency at three, metrics reproducibility at two, disclosure preparedness at four, and key-person dependence at two.
Intellectual property is lowest at one and depends on a lawyer and a designer, so he starts it on day one and then works on financial reconciliation, which is the next lowest and also the one that unlocks the most.
5. Common mistakes and how to fix them
The first mistake is setting readiness outcomes that depend on an investor. Fix it by using the three internal measures, all of which you control.
The second is budgeting hours and forgetting fees. Fix it by obtaining indicative figures before committing, since an unbudgeted fee is where readiness projects stall.
The third is working on the lowest score when it depends on a third party. Fix it by starting the third-party work immediately and working the next lowest meanwhile.
The fourth is treating disclosure preparedness as unimportant because it produces no document anyone requests. Fix it by remembering that it is what prevents a small problem becoming a discovered one.
Key takeaways
6. Board summary
Readiness outcomes are entirely within your control, which removes the usual excuse for vague targets. Three outcomes suffice: mock diligence supported score, document inventory score, and the reconciliation gap driven to zero. Budget professional fees as well as hours, because an unbudgeted fee is where readiness projects stall in month two. Eight capabilities decide readiness, and two or below is a constraint. None of this causes an investment; it removes the reasons an interested investor leaves, and leaves a better-run business either way.
Check your understanding
7. Practice and self-check
Question one: Why is outcome setting easier in this programme? Answer: because almost every outcome is within your own control rather than someone else's decision.
Question two: Name the three outcomes. Answer: the mock diligence supported score, the document inventory score, and the reconciliation gap.
Question three: Moving from seven to sixteen out of twenty requires how many questions to become evidenced? Answer: nine.
Question four: Why estimate professional fees before starting? Answer: because an unbudgeted fee at the moment of committing is where readiness work stalls.
Question five: Rohan's own time is about twenty-two hours across a quarter. What is that per week? Answer: under two hours a week.
Question six: Which capability did he start first and why? Answer: intellectual property, because it scored lowest and depends on a lawyer and a designer whose timetables he cannot compress.
Question seven: Name any four of the eight capabilities. Answer: any four of financial reconciliation, cap table integrity, contract coverage, intellectual property ownership, compliance currency, metrics reproducibility, disclosure preparedness, and key-person dependence.
Question eight: What does readiness honestly deliver? Answer: removal of the reasons an interested investor leaves, and a business that is easier to run, lend to and sell.