Business assessment: find out what is blocking your growth

Step 01 — in detail

A full picture of your business, before any recommendation

Before making any recommendation, we take the time to understand your business as a whole: its history, the constraints weighing on it, and the ambitions you hold for it. This in-depth conversation with you, as the business owner, sets the foundation for the entire assessment.

Together we explore concrete questions: is your business growing, plateauing, or declining, and since when? What are your goals for the months and years ahead? What decisions do you expect to be able to make once this assessment is complete?

This first conversation also allows us to compare your own perception of the situation with the initial data available, and to define together the exact scope of the assessment: what will be examined first, and what can be analysed further later if needed.

Understanding your numbers and what they reveal

We then review the major financial dimensions of your business, based on the information available to you:

• Revenue — its recent trend and its breakdown by offer, customer type or channel, according to the data available.
• Costs and expenses — the structure of your fixed and variable costs, and what weighs most heavily on your profitability.
• Margins and profit — what actually remains once costs are covered, and how that has evolved over time.
• Cash flow — your ability to meet day-to-day obligations, independent of your revenue level.

These four dimensions don't always tell the same story: rising revenue can come with falling margins, just as tight cash flow can coexist with a business that is profitable on paper. Spotting exactly this kind of mismatch is what we look for from this very first step.

Looking beyond the numbers too

Financial results never explain themselves: they are the consequence of what happens in your business day to day — your offer, your customers, your position against the competition, your sales and marketing approach, or how your internal organisation works.

At this stage, the links we draw between your numbers and your business remain working hypotheses, not established conclusions. They will be tested and explored further in the following steps of the assessment, based on the indicators and documents available.

A structured approach to tracing root causes

Our approach draws on the structured problem-solving principles popularised by the consulting firm McKinsey & Company: defining the question precisely, breaking the problem down into analysable parts, forming hypotheses and then testing them against the facts. We combine this conversation with a review of the documents and indicators you make available to us.

ANTOINE CODEX adapts this approach to your business and is not affiliated with or certified by McKinsey & Company.

A clear foundation for the rest of the assessment

This first step doesn't claim to explain everything in a single conversation: it sets a clear foundation — the starting situation, the main questions to address, and the information still needed to answer them fully.

The following steps of the assessment build on this foundation to evaluate the options available and build, together with you, a concrete action plan.

Artificial intelligence and automation can be part of the solutions considered later, when that proves relevant — but the recommendations may just as well concern your strategy, your offer, your pricing, your organisation, or your sales practices.

Understand your business. Identify the causes. Choose the right actions.

The depth of the analysis depends on the agreed scope and the information available. Missing data and the limits of our conclusions are always clearly flagged. No financial result or growth outcome is guaranteed.