Business baseline.
What you sell, who buys it, and how the work actually gets done day to day.
Every consultation starts here, whether the owner knows it or not: a plain picture of the business as it runs today. Not the pitch deck version — the Tuesday version. What leaves the door, who pays for it, and what it takes to deliver.
What this area covers
- What you sell, and what customers actually buy most
- Who your customers are, and how they differ from each other
- How work flows from first contact to finished job and paid invoice
- Who does what — including the work only the owner can do
- A normal week: where hours go, where the friction sits
Why it matters
Advice without a baseline is stereotype. Two businesses in the same industry can have opposite problems — one starved for demand, the other drowning in it with nowhere to put it — and only the baseline tells them apart. Everything later in the consultation stands on this picture, so it is built from the owner's own facts, not from what businesses like theirs usually look like.
How it relates to the five steps
Pairs most closely with step 1: you cannot understand a business without its baseline. But the baseline is a lens, not a stage — the conversation returns to it whenever a later claim needs checking, and a diagnosis that contradicts the baseline is a diagnosis that needs better evidence.