The Front Door
The platform's biggest value lever, found, sized, and sequenced into a plan the fund can underwrite.
Duration
6 to 8 weeks
Structure
One fixed fee
Output
A board-ready plan
Timings
Pre-close · Post-close · Exit
What it is
Every engagement starts here. 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, 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 firm and the answer is payer. Bring in a commercial firm and the answer is pipeline. A single-function audit always finds its own function's problem.
This diagnostic has no predetermined answer. It examines the three systems every platform runs on, goes deep where the evidence points, and sizes the lever the evidence implicates. The question it answers is the one your IC already asks: can this platform execute the thesis, and where's the value.
How the company is run
KPIs, cadence, governance, reporting, unit economics.
How it grows organically
Referral infrastructure, acquisition and retention, markets and service lines, payer economics.
How it grows by acquisition
Deal evaluation and integration capability.
The lever is named
Your team has already called it from the deal model. But the deal model names levers top-down. Six weeks inside the platform, working bottom-up from the operating floor, tells you what the lever is actually worth and whether the company 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 company runs, triage all three systems, then size the one worth the most.
Pre-close
Sign-to-close in four to six weeks, commissioned by the sponsor. For the deal team, the question diligence doesn't answer: which capability gaps the platform must close to execute the thesis. For the incoming CEO, a co-authored build plan.
Post-close
The most common entry. The opening six to eight weeks of the hold, inside the first hundred days, with room left to start the build the diagnostic defines.
At exit
The same instrument points backward: is the value built during the hold legible and defensible to the next buyer. Run before the process starts, while there's still time to fix what it finds.
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.
The diagnostic defines the build. Fixed scope, signed off by both sides before it starts. 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 what I'd size first, and whether the diagnostic fits your window.
Start a Conversation
© 2026 Martel Health