Value Lever Diagnostic
Which lever is worth the most, and can this platform actually move it?
Duration
6 to 8 weeks
Structure
One fixed fee
Output
The Value Lever Plan
What it is
Every build starts from a sized lever. If you don't have one, this is how you get it. The diagnostic finds and sizes the platform's biggest value lever and hands you a board-ready plan: the sized prize, the targets, the build sequence. It speaks the language your IC already uses. Revenue growth, margin expansion, acquisitions, the multiple. Then it tells you which one this platform can actually move, what that is worth, and what it takes to capture it.
Bring in a payer-contracting shop and the answer is your rates. Bring in a growth consultancy and the answer is your pipeline. A single-function audit always finds its own function's problem. The finding is usually real. Whether it is the constraint actually capping the platform's value is a question that audit was never built to ask.
This diagnostic has no predetermined answer. It maps the four areas where a platform's value actually moves, goes deep where the evidence points, and sizes the lever the evidence implicates. It answers the two questions the deal model can't: can this platform execute the thesis, and what will it actually take to capture the value the model assumed?
What the diagnostic examines
Volume growth
Commercial infrastructure
Referral development, practice affiliation, and entry into new markets and service lines. The commercial data architecture underneath them.
Pricing optimization
Payer economics
Rate, mix, and capture, plus the move into risk and value-based contracts.
Operating leverage
Unit economics
Cost to serve by site, by service line, by patient, and the delivery capacity that sets it.
Inorganic growth
Add-on execution
Evaluation, qualification, diligence coordination, integration, post-close tracking.
The lever is named
Your team has already called it from the deal model. But a deal model names levers top-down, and named is not sized. Six weeks working bottom-up from the operating floor tells you what the lever is actually worth and whether the platform can capture it. You arrive with a name. You leave with a number and a plan.
The thesis is open
The platform isn't where the thesis needs it and no single lever has announced itself. Eight weeks: I baseline how the platform runs, triage all four areas, then size the one worth the most. You arrive with a problem. You leave with the lever, its number, and the sequence to capture it.
Pre-close
Sign-to-close, six to eight weeks, commissioned by the sponsor. The evidence comes from diligence and management rather than the operating floor. The plan lands before the platform is yours, so the hold opens with the build already scoped.
Post-close
The most common entry: the opening six to eight weeks of the hold, inside the first hundred days, with room to start the build.
Mid-hold
When the plan has slipped, the market has moved or the leadership has changed. The evidence is what the hold has produced so far, read against what the deal model assumed. The plan that comes out re-underwrites the thesis for the years left.
When this tends to be the right call
Pre-close
The LOI is signed and the value creation plan still names levers nobody has sized.
Diligence confirmed the numbers. Nobody has checked whether the platform can run the plan built on them.
After close
The hundred-day plan lists nine priorities and nobody has ranked them.
The deal model named the lever. No one at the platform can say how big it actually is.
Mid-hold
The fund and the CEO see the value in different places and nobody has had the time to build the case either way.
Two years in, the thesis needs re-underwriting, and the recovery plan behind it is too thin to underwrite.
Not needed
If the lever already has a number behind it and the team has built this before, skip the diagnostic and start the build.
A document your IC can read without translation. The sized prize up front: what the lever is worth and how the number was built. The targets underneath it. The build sequence with decision gates, and an honest read on what the platform's operating base can carry today and what it can't yet. Executable with or without me.
Illustrative exampleValue Lever DiagnosticThe diagnostic defines the build. Fixed scope, signed off by both sides before it starts, and built in the Transformation Office. Or take the plan and run it with your own team. Either way, you spent a known, fixed fee to answer a question worth many multiples of it, before committing to a build.
Tell me about the platform and the thesis. I'll tell you where I'd look, and whether the diagnostic fits your window.
Start a Conversation
© 2026 Martel Health