The Studio Blueprint engine is a deterministic computation system. It does not use AI to generate its analysis. Every figure, risk score, and structural assessment is computed from rules derived from three decades of consulting practice and direct observation of what causes independent consultancies to succeed or fail.
This page explains the methodology. It does not reveal the scoring algorithms or weighting rules, which are proprietary. It describes the thinking behind the tool so that users understand what they are getting and why it works the way it does.
The engine never invents numbers. Every financial figure in the output is computed from the user's specific inputs. Revenue targets, client counts, monthly burn rates, runway calculations. All derived, never assumed.
AI extracts evidence. It never determines scores. The diagnostic uses deterministic logic for all assessments. The same inputs always produce the same outputs. There is no randomness, no generative content, and no hallucinated figures.
Honesty over encouragement. The engine is designed to surface structural problems, not to validate decisions already made. If the model does not work, the diagnostic says so clearly and explains why.
Where you come from shapes what you can build. Someone leaving a holding company faces different structural challenges than someone leaving a consultancy or an in-house role. The engine maps these patterns: the advantages your background creates (network, credibility, domain expertise) and the blind spots it introduces (commercial assumptions, pricing instincts, client expectations).
The shape of what you are building determines its structural requirements. A lifestyle practice serving three clients has fundamentally different economics from a growth-oriented agency targeting enterprise accounts. The engine identifies tensions between ambition and model: where the operating approach contradicts the revenue target, where the team structure cannot support the client type, where the growth plan conflicts with the financial runway.
Enterprise clients create long sales cycles and payment terms that strain cash flow. SME clients require volume that demands marketing spend and operational capacity. Global ambitions introduce complexity that increases burn rate. The engine computes the specific financial implications of your market choice and tests whether your runway can absorb the acquisition timeline.
Most consultancies that fail do so because of cash flow, not capability. The engine computes monthly burn rate, revenue requirements, client acquisition targets, and runway in weeks. It models the gap between when costs begin and when revenue arrives, and identifies the point at which the model becomes unsustainable if client acquisition does not meet the projected timeline.
How you intend to work determines your capacity ceiling. The engine assesses whether your approach to AI augmentation, your comfort with automation, and your operational structure can deliver the output volume your revenue target requires. It identifies where human judgment remains essential and where AI creates genuine leverage in your specific service model.
The Reality Index is a composite score from 0 to 100. It is not a prediction of success. It is a measure of structural viability: how well the configuration you have described holds together as a system.
A high Reality Index means the financial model is internally consistent, the market choice aligns with the revenue target, the runway can absorb the likely sales cycle, and the operating model can deliver what the client type demands. A low score means one or more of these elements is in tension with the others.
The score is useful because it surfaces problems that are difficult to see from inside your own planning. Most founders overestimate how quickly revenue will arrive and underestimate how much structural alignment matters. The Reality Index quantifies what a good advisor would intuit.
The engine identifies and scores structural risks specific to the user's configuration. These are not generic business risks. They are tensions between specific answers: a pricing model that contradicts the client type, a runway that cannot survive the enterprise sales cycle, a service offering that requires capabilities the operating model does not support.
Each risk is scored by severity and mapped to its structural cause. The premium blueprint extends this into mitigation strategies and failure mode scenarios: what specifically happens if each risk materialises, and what the founder can do to reduce the probability or contain the impact.
The free diagnostic gives you the Reality Index, a financial summary, and the top structural risks. The premium blueprint (30+ pages) extends this into the depth required for actual decision-making.
It includes financial projections with worked calculations, a structural constraint analysis identifying the primary bottleneck in the model, failure mode scenarios specific to the user's configuration, pricing psychology and negotiation frameworks tailored to the target client type, an AI tool stack recommendation based on the service offering, a 90-day execution roadmap with week-by-week priorities, and the specific lines the founder should not cross when building their client base.
Every section uses only the figures computed from the user's answers. The narrative is conditional: different inputs produce different analysis, different risks, different recommendations. Two founders with different configurations will receive fundamentally different blueprints.
The diagnostic takes four minutes. The methodology has been refined over thirty years of watching what works and what does not.
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