Partnership readiness review

What it is

It is a structured look at whether results can be measured fairly and grown realistically. Performance pay sounds simple until you try to write it down. Which sales count? Which month does a sale belong to? What if the owner raises prices halfway through? The review surfaces those questions while they're still cheap to answer.

It isn't an audit, and we aren't accountants. We read the numbers you already keep and ask how they're produced. Bookkeeping and tax questions belong with your own accountant.

Who it is for

Any owner considering the Growth Partner Program, and any owner thinking about a performance deal with anyone. The questions are the same whoever the partner is. It is particularly useful if:

• your sales history lives in more than one system
• you've had a recent unusual year, up or down
• several people make pricing or hiring decisions
• you've tried a results-based arrangement before and it ended in a dispute

What we look at

Four areas, each with a few specific questions.

Records

• Can you produce monthly sales or new-customer counts for at least the last two years?
• Is there a reliable way to see where each customer came from?
• Are refunds, cancellations and repeat orders recorded separately?

Capacity

• If enquiries rose by a quarter next month, who would answer them and who would do the work?
• Are there seasonal months when you already turn work away?

Decisions

• Who can approve changes to the website, pricing, offers and staffing?
• How quickly can those decisions be made?

Stability

• Is anything planned that would distort the numbers: a move, a new location, a price change, a key hire leaving?
• Has anything unusual happened recently, such as a competitor closing or a large one-off contract?

What you receive

A short written verdict: yes, yes with conditions, not yet, or no, with the evidence for each point. Where the answer is "not yet", the review lists the specific gaps and roughly what closing them involves. Often the most useful outcome is the first draft of a shared growth scorecard, because the review has already defined what should be counted.

Timeline

Most of the time is spent gathering records, so the pace is largely yours. The conversations themselves are short. Owners with tidy reports can move through it quickly; owners pulling numbers out of several spreadsheets need longer, and that effort is useful on its own.

How the outcome is measured

The review succeeds if, at the end, both sides could write down what a result is and agree on the number for last year. If that's possible, a partnership can be discussed with confidence. If it isn't, the review has saved both sides from a deal that would have ended badly.

Questions owners often ask during the review

The same few concerns come up repeatedly. Owners ask whether incomplete records rule them out (usually not, if the gaps can be closed), whether a seasonal business can be measured fairly (yes, with like-for-like comparisons), and whether a recent bad year disqualifies them (no, but it has to be understood before a baseline is set). Bring those questions to the conversation rather than guessing.

Mistakes to avoid

• Presenting your strongest year as typical. It makes the baseline unrealistic and the partnership harder to judge.
• Hiding capacity limits. If you can't serve more customers, growth work only frustrates everyone.
• Sharing more personal data than needed. Aggregated reports usually answer the question. Privacy rules differ by province; see the areas pages for which law applies where you operate.
• Treating a "not yet" as a rejection. It is a to-do list.

To start, call, text or email and mention that you'd like a readiness conversation. The pricing page shows the published project range if a fuller review is scoped as a project.