The eight archetypes.
Your nine scores don't just sit on a chart — they form a shape. And most businesses, however different they look from the outside, match one of eight recognisable patterns. Your archetype is the headline of your diagnostic.
A score tells you where. An archetype tells you what.
Knowing a single area is weak is useful. Knowing the combination — which areas are strong, which are soft, and how they interact — is far more useful. That combination is your archetype: a pattern-match to one of eight common business shapes.
It's where most of the value lives. Two businesses can score the same overall and be running completely different risks. The archetype names the risk, the tension and the shape your business usually takes next — so you're not just fixing a number, you're understanding the situation.
Which one are you running?
The Founder-Led Engine
Real traction, built on energy and instinct. Customers are coming and the product works — but everything still runs through the founder, and that is the ceiling.
The Stalled Specialist
The craft is excellent and the credibility is real, yet new business has gone quiet. The thing holding it back is almost never the work itself.
The Scaling Operator
Strategy, people and sales are firing and the business is genuinely moving — but growth has started to test foundations that were never fully tightened.
The Cashflow Juggler
Sales are happening and customers are paying, yet cash stays tight and too many decisions get made reactively instead of from a clear view.
The Concentration Risk
Loyal customers who genuinely love you — just too few of them, with a pipeline that isn't replenishing fast enough to change the dependence.
The Undefined Brand
Strong delivery, unclear story. Prospects can't immediately tell who it's for, what makes it different, or why the price is what it is.
The Burning Founder
The company's numbers look healthy; the founder's don't. Something — health, recovery, relationships — is quietly taking the strain to keep it all going.
The Balanced Builder
No single area letting the business down, and no one running themselves into the ground to make it work. The rarest pattern — and one that changes the question entirely.
Which one are you?
Twelve minutes of honest scoring and you'll have your archetype, your radar, and the full read on what to do about it.
Take the Diagnostic