The data behind your report
Three inputs feed every report:
- Your intake. The answers you give about how the business actually operates: margins, growth, channel mix, team, cash, and the goal you are reaching for.
- A comparable set. Aggregated data from thousands of consumer brands in your revenue and channel territory, not a generic industry average.
- Your financial and operational picture. The numbers the intake captures, read together rather than one at a time.
The same engine reads every company the same way. Nothing is hand-tuned to flatter or alarm.
How your numbers are compared
"Where You Stand" is built against real operating and institutional financial data, not an industry mean. Each metric is compared only where the comparison changes the answer: gross margin by channel and category, ad spend by revenue band, trade spend by retailer tier. Where your channel mix matters, the peer range is weighted to your own DTC, Amazon, and wholesale split rather than an average. Where the data supports precision the comparison is banded; where it does not, it is left flat rather than made falsely precise. Some readings are not peer comparisons at all: they describe where your business stands on its own.
Where the benchmarks come from
The rules behind these comparisons encode operator judgment, not just data: patterns from advising more than 100 consumer product founders, and from scaling one of them to exit.
Benchmarks are directional, drawn from institutional financial datasets, platform-level ecommerce analytics, and category research: licensed and aggregated, specific to your product category and weighted to your reported sales-channel mix, with revenue-band adjustments where company size materially changes what "typical" looks like. Use them as a planning reference, and validate against your own actuals before making material decisions.
What each score measures
Measures whether your three-year revenue target is right-sized for your company. It pressure-tests the goal against your financials, growth history, channel economics, and category, and answers one question: is your goal credible? (Credible, which is not the same as doable.) An unrealistic goal wastes resources chasing what the math does not support; an under-ambitious one leaves growth on the table. GCS is built from three readings:
- Track record: whether you have shown the kind of performance the goal requires, and the gap between your proven pace and the pace the goal needs.
- Financial health: whether your unit economics and cash position can fund the goal: margin, runway, working capital, and how spend is allocated across channels.
- Strategic alignment: whether your choices fit together: price-to-channel fit, revenue per SKU, and whether your stated plan and your actual spending tell the same story.
Measures whether your operating system, your team, processes, tools, and decision-making, can actually deliver the goal, not just whether the business survives your absence. A credible goal on a fragile operation leads to missed targets, unsustainable founder load, or both. ORS is built from three readings:
- Founder dependency (Antihero Index): how much the business depends on you personally versus running through your team and systems.
- Drift in execution (Anti-Drift Index): how well the company stays on course without you steering every decision.
- Operating load: the structural strain your business model itself puts on the operation, inventory, catalog complexity, order economics, payment timing, separate from how you run it day to day.