What the audit measures, and how.
The Growth Audit measures the health of a company's growth system, not its growth rate. Revenue growth is an outcome. The audit examines the inputs, capabilities, and conditions that produce that outcome.
The output is a Growth Score between 0 and 100, broken down across nine dimensions. The score is not a grade. It is a diagnostic map.
The score adapts to your stage.
What matters most changes as a company grows. Early on, retention and product-market fit carry the most weight, because little else compounds without them. As revenue grows, monetization, operations, and systems start to decide whether growth holds.
So the weights move with you. A pre-revenue company that scores low on Revenue and Operations is not failing; those systems do not exist yet because they should not exist yet. The score always reflects structural health relative to what is appropriate for your stage, never against a standard set somewhere else.
The exact weights, and the reasoning behind each one, are versioned inside the methodology. What matters to a reader is the principle: early on, the weight sits on the gate and the front of the lifecycle, product-market fit and retention, activation, acquisition, and positioning. As a company scales, it migrates toward revenue, growth loops, and operations. Team and leadership carry steady weight throughout.
Inapplicable questions are excluded, not zeroed.
Some questions produce structurally invalid scores at certain stages. A pre-revenue company has no churn because it has no customers. Scoring churn as 0 for that company does not mean its retention system is broken. It means the question does not apply.
When a question is inapplicable at your stage, it is excluded from both the raw score and the maximum score. The dimension is calculated from applicable questions only. Some questions carry null-state flags, and they activate as your company advances to the stage where they become meaningful.
Four options, no safe middle.
Every question has four answer options scored 0 to 3. Five-point scales produce a safe-middle bias, where respondents cluster at 3 out of 5. Four options force a real answer.
Dimension score is raw points divided by maximum points, scaled to 100. The overall Growth Score is the weighted sum of dimension scores using your stage's weight table. Deterministic, reproducible, no AI in the diagnosis.
Built on the published record, not house opinion.
Every dimension traces to the documented body of the field, not to our preference. The mechanics come from the practitioners who defined them: Sean Ellis on product-market fit, Brian Balfour on growth loops, Casey Winters on retention, Andrew Chen on channels and network effects, Madhavan Ramanujam on pricing to willingness to pay. The economics and the executive view come from the research houses: McKinsey on growth as the dominant driver of long-run value, Bain on loyalty economics. And what marketing science actually knows comes from the academy: the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and Byron Sharp on how brands grow, Binet and Field on the timescales of brand and activation. A claim that cannot be traced to this record does not enter the audit. That is the standard the instrument is built to defend.
What the audit does not measure.
Documenting the limits of the audit is part of the methodology. It measures the system that produces outcomes, not the outcomes themselves. These are outside its scope:
A strong score in a declining market does not guarantee growth. The audit tells you whether your growth system is structurally sound. It does not predict the market.
Judge the methodology, then run it.
The audit applies this method to your company in 20 to 30 minutes, and the results stay with you.