The Commercial Logic diagnostic is a comprehensive measurement of your CLV:CAC ratio: what it truly costs to acquire a customer, what that customer is worth, and whether the two add up.
Believed healthy. Measured 0.53:1, below the 1:1 break-even.
Leads, conversion rates, attribution, and pipeline describe what marketing did. None of them tell a CFO what a customer costs to acquire, or what that customer returns.
The CMO has the shortest tenure in the C-suite, and the job description usually asks for a fixer: more leads, more pipeline, more demand. So the work begins with fixing, before anyone has asked the question that decides whether any of it pays: how much does a customer cost, and what are they worth?
When the question is finally asked, the answer is almost always wrong. Acquisition cost is understated, because the fully-loaded cost of winning a customer is rarely counted. Lifetime value is overstated, because revenue stands in for margin. And the ratio that connects them belongs to no single function, so no one governs it.
The result is capital allocated on conviction rather than evidence. Research puts the value at stake at 20 to 40 percent of marketing's financial contribution. The diagnostic replaces the conviction with a number, calculated to a standard a CFO will accept and a marketer can act on.
The inputs are built to finance standards: fully-loaded costs, gross margin, a discount rate, and a five-year cohort cap. The outputs are two numbers both functions can stand behind.
Enter the core business profile. This provides the commercial context for all subsequent calculations.
You receive your CLV:CAC position against benchmark, your true acquisition cost, net customer value, payback period, and the priorities that will move the ratio most.
Each new customer costs more to win than it returns over its discounted lifetime. This is the priority to fix.
Blended CAC overstates true acquisition cost by 30.2%.
CLV:CAC is 0.53:1 against a 3:1 minimum; payback 56 months.
Marketing claims 50.0% of pipeline; only 18.8% is verifiable.
The CLV:CAC ratio is a verdict. Capital Burn Velocity is its speed: the rate, in pounds per month, at which your acquisition engine is creating or destroying value. It is the second headline number the diagnostic now produces, and it turns a static score into a cash-flow sentence a CFO can act on.
For every new customer, the diagnostic already holds two numbers: the fully-loaded cost to acquire them, and the net present value of what they return. The gap between those is the economic result of winning that customer. Multiply it by the rate you are acquiring, and you have a velocity, a figure in pounds per month.
The metric pivots on the 1:1 line, where lifetime value equals acquisition cost. Above it, the velocity is negative and you are accumulating capital. Below it, the velocity is positive and you are destroying it. This is the value-destruction rate of the acquisition engine specifically, not total company cash burn, and that precision is the point.
It is the number that ends a familiar argument. At a ratio below 1:1, every additional pound of acquisition spend accelerates the burn, so "more budget to test and learn" becomes spending faster to destroy value faster. Burn Velocity puts an exact figure on how much faster.
£835,000 a year at the current acquisition pace.
A number on its own changes nothing. Where the diagnostic finds a problem, the repair follows in the order the ratio dictates, not the order of the loudest tactic. That can run as a fixed-scope project or as ongoing fractional leadership.
See the ways to work together →Calibrate is a ten-minute self-assessment. It gives you an indicative view of where your acquisition economics stand, at no cost and no login, and shows whether the full diagnostic is worth your time.
A fixed-fee engagement with a board-ready verdict. Typical delivery in two to three weeks.