Free Assessment · The Unicorn Mentor
Most businesses don't fail overnight.
They leak first.
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Stopping any leaks before they sink your business is your
highest priority today
If you are scaling a business and something feels harder than it should — decisions are slower, the strategy isn't landing, the same problems keep surfacing in different forms — you are almost certainly not failing. You are leaking. Value drains silently across four domains: strategy that never reaches the frontline, execution that stalls between intent and operation, teams that wait for the founder rather than act without them, and growth that eats margin faster than it creates it.
The Stop the Leaks Assessment maps your business across the four pillars of the PATH framework and gives you a diagnostic picture of exactly where your business is losing value. Your lowest score is your binding constraint and your highest-leverage starting point. Enter your details below and the assessment will be with you immediately.
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Stop leaking, Start scaling
What the assessment gives you
A scored diagnostic across all four PATH pillars — P, A, T, and H
Identification of your primary leak — the constraint costing you most right now
A 90-day priority sequencing guide based on your lowest score
The distinction between a strategy problem and an operational bottleneck — and why the fix is different for each
A clear starting point for a Stop the Leaks discussion with Stuart Webb if you want to go deeper
Case Studies
Case Study 01 · Primary Leak:
A — Execution Leakage
The strategy that lived only in the boardroom
Professional services firm · £7M revenue · 45 employees · UK
PATH Pillar A
The situation
The leadership team had invested six months in developing a clear three-year strategy. They had run an offsite, aligned on priorities, and produced a polished document. Twelve months later, the senior team could recite the strategy. The delivery teams were still operating on the previous year's priorities. Revenue had grown modestly but margin had declined. The MD described it as "running very hard to stand still."
The leak identified
Assessment scored A at 9/25 — the lowest pillar. The strategy existed but had never been translated into operational reality. No strategic pillar mapped to a specific workflow change. No Stop-Doing list had been produced alongside the new priorities. The weekly management meeting was a status update, not a friction-hunting session. Middle management was implementing last year's processes to deliver this year's goals.
The structural fix
Each of the four strategic pillars was mapped to a named operational change with a named owner.
A Stop-Doing list was produced and formally communicated.
The weekly management meeting was redesigned as a 30-minute "friction hunt" — one agenda question: what did we learn this week that makes our current approach obsolete?
A 90-day Strategic Pulse was installed, connecting quarterly priorities to weekly team activity.
Outcomes — 90 days post-implementation
73%
of team could articulate the top strategic priority unprompted (up from 31%)
4.2→1.8
weeks average time from strategic decision to frontline implementation
+6pts
gross margin improvement as legacy low-margin activities were formally retired
"We had the strategy. What we were missing was the bridge. Once we built it, the business started moving in a direction I could actually see."
Therese, Managing Director · Professional Services · £7M
Case Study 02 · Primary Leak:
T — Founder Bottleneck
The founder who was the ceiling
Technology services business · £5M revenue · 28 employees · UK
PATH Pillar T
The situation
The founder had built a profitable, well-regarded technology services business. She was aware that growth had plateaued at around £5M for two consecutive years. Every senior hire she had made in the past 18 months had underperformed her expectations. Client relationships of any significance still ran through her personally. She was working 60+ hours per week and described herself as "the busiest person in the building and the biggest obstacle to it growing."
The leak identified
Assessment scored T (Delegation) at 8/25. The Vacation Test confirmed it: when the founder was unavailable for a week during illness, three client escalations went unresolved and one renewal was delayed. Decision rights had never been formally defined. Senior hires had job descriptions but no defined authority — they were hired as leaders but operating as highly paid advisors waiting for permission. The founder was solving every problem rather than systematising the reasons problems arose.
The structural fix
A Decision Rights Framework was built: every key decision category mapped to a named owner at the appropriate level.
A Decision Threshold Protocol defined what could be decided without the founder based on budget, risk, and client impact.
Each senior hire was given a 90-day "redundancy plan" — a list of the specific decisions and client relationships they were expected to own fully within 90 days. Weekly 1:1s were restructured to surface friction, not report status.
Outcomes — 6 months post-implementation
60%
reduction in decisions requiring founder input each week
£1.4M
new business closed by senior team without founder involvement in the sales process
2 weeks
founder took first full holiday in 4 years — no operational disruption
"I hired senior people and then didn't let them be senior. The problem wasn't them — it was that I'd never actually defined what being senior meant in terms of what they were allowed to decide."
Claire, Founder · Technology Services · £5M
Case Study 03 · Primary Leak:
H — Growth-Complexity Mismatch
The business that grew itself into a problem
E-commerce and fulfilment business · £14M revenue · 62 employees · UK
PATH Pillar H
The situation
Revenue had grown from £6M to £14M over three years. Headcount had grown from 22 to 62 over the same period. Gross margin had declined from 34% to 26%. The operations director described the business as "running at 95% capacity all the time." Every new client added operational complexity that wasn't reflected in the pricing. The MD had begun to suspect that certain client segments were actually loss-making once true fulfilment costs were allocated.
The leak identified
Assessment scored H at 11/25 and A at 13/25. A Revenue Quality Audit revealed that 22% of revenue — concentrated in the bottom tier of clients — was generating negative gross margin once labour, handling, and support costs were fully allocated. The business had grown by adding volume without redesigning its cost structure. Operational complexity had scaled 1:1 with revenue rather than decoupling from it. There was no standardisation of the middle 80% of fulfilment operations.
The structural fix
A full Revenue Quality Audit was conducted and client segments ranked by true gross margin. The bottom tier (18 clients) was repriced or exited over six months. The middle 80% of fulfilment workflows were standardised and documented, enabling a shift from bespoke to configurable.
A new pricing model reflected true operational cost including complexity loading. Headcount growth was frozen for 90 days while the operational architecture was redesigned to handle the existing volume more efficiently.
Outcomes — 9 months post-implementation
34%
gross margin restored — same level as three years prior despite 2.3x the revenue
£2.1M
revenue exited — but EBITDA increased by £380k in the same period
0
net new hires in 9 months while handling same volume with improved service levels
"We thought we had a growth problem. We had a profitability problem disguised as a growth problem. Stopping doing some things was the most counterintuitive and most valuable thing we did."
Chadd, MD · E-commerce and Fulfilment · £14M
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