On the previous page you read why value drivers are rarely made explicit, and why that only becomes a problem once someone else has to oversee the company. Here you see what happens step by step once you start, and what each step asks of you.
The intake consists of a series of questions per value driver. These can be filled in by one person, but don't have to be. In practice, the owner fills in the questions about customer relationships, decision-making and succession, and the CFO or the person responsible for finance fills in the questions about management information and figures. Each participant gets their own scope and only sees the questions that belong to it.
No annual accounts or supplied documents are needed. Figures are entered as classes and ranges — you indicate the order of magnitude something falls into, not the exact amount. This makes the intake faster to complete and limits the sensitivity of what you share. Most of the time goes into retrieving what already exists in terms of management information and documentation, not into the filling in itself.
What you enter is not assessed by a person but processed according to fixed rules from a dataset. Every score on every driver comes from the same rule set, so that two companies with the same input get the same score. That is why the outcome remains explainable: every score shows which answer or which combination of answers led to it. No black box, no estimate that cannot be traced back to what you entered.
Alongside the score per driver, the owner-dependency index emerges: an indication of how much of the commercial knowledge, customer relationships and decision-making rests with one or a few people. This index too is built from the same kind of traceable rules, not from a separate judgement.
After that, it is shown per driver what it does to the indicative range, and in which direction. A low score on management information pushes the range down, professionalising it shifts the range up. Every statement comes with its source: which rule or which answer determines the sensitivity. This way you see not only that a driver carries weight, but also why, and you can check that against your own input.
This is the part where the eight drivers from What it is come together with a concrete figure: not one score, but eight scores that each explain a piece of the range.
The last step converts the scores into a two-year plan: per driver it shows when something should start in order to show a higher maturity at a chosen exit moment. That plan consists of clocks — fixed moments by which something should have been addressed — not advice on what you should do then.
The report that follows from this contains three outcomes: the maturity scores per driver with the evidence behind them, the owner-dependency index, and the indicative range with the sensitivity per driver. The report comes as a document you can share with an accountant, adviser or potential buyer, and includes a bridge to the work scan for those who want to tackle a driver concretely. More about the form and content of these three outcomes can be found on the Outcomes page.
The tool is built to be run through more than once. A repetition after improvements to, for example, management information or the succession structure shows whether the score on that driver has shifted, and whether that has shifted the range. Because every score is traceable to the same rule set, two measurements can be laid over each other: you see what has changed since the previous time, not just a new figure without comparison.
This also makes the calendar from step 4 verifiable. A clock that was set two years before the exit moment can, at a subsequent measurement, be ticked off or turn out to have remained untouched. Those who want to know more about exactly how drivers, scores and clocks are defined will find the background in the knowledge base.
The eight scores, the index and the range are a strategic picture of where the value sits and where the risk lies. What that picture means in tasks, hours and systems — who is going to do what and with what capacity — is the follow-up that the work scan on ftetoai.com brings into view.