The Growth-Stage TOM: a diagnostic for boards and PE ops.

Most growth-stage SaaS businesses do not have an operating model. They have a sales machine plus a founder plus a lot of goodwill. That works to about £10M ARR. After that, the goodwill runs out. The founder cannot personally hold every function together. The sales machine is now shipping deals faster than the delivery function can keep up. The board asks "how is the business?" and gets a slide deck instead of an answer.

This paper is a diagnostic. Twenty questions, grouped into four operating components: Governance, Commercial, Delivery, and Operating Discipline. It takes thirty minutes to run and ninety minutes to talk through with your leadership team. Every operating area of your business either has a named owner or it does not. Every risk is either scored or it is not. The diagnostic tells you where you actually are.

It does not replace strategy. It does not replace product-market fit. It does not tell you what to build. It tells you whether the machine underneath your growth can support the growth you already have, and the growth you are about to try to add.

What is inside

• The twenty-question diagnostic in full, with scoring bands and a component variance rule
• The four operating components: what each is, what it does, how it interlocks, and how it fails
• Three cross-industry worked examples: a life sciences platform, a fintech scale-up, a healthtech operator
• The IT and AI stack layered on top of the operating model, one platform per layer where volume justifies it
• Where the model does not apply: pre-Series A, distress situations, and the founder-only exception
• How to use the diagnostic with a board, and what a good quarterly review of each component looks like

Who it is for

CEOs and chairs of growth-stage B2B SaaS businesses between roughly £5M and £100M ARR, Series B or later. Private equity operating partners running the post-close operating-model rebuild. Non-executive directors preparing for a quarterly review that goes beyond "how is the business."

Written from an operating perspective

Four exits over three decades (Lotus to IBM, Paragon to Phone.com, Apertio to Nokia $240M, Clearswift to Lyceum) plus COO and CGO seats at Lumeon and Sapio Sciences. Every observation is drawn from operating rooms, not consultant decks.