Advisory · Advise

Market Assessment

A market, a category, or a set of vendors, written to an evidence standard. Every claim carries a label saying what kind of evidence stands behind it. Every source is numbered and clickable. There are no forecasts, because nobody can produce one honestly, so you get scenarios with tripwires you can watch for yourself.

15 TO 25 PAGES 10 BUSINESS DAYS WORD + PDF

Most research blends three different things into one voice.

A vendor's self-reported growth number, a research firm's proprietary forecast, and the author's own opinion get written in the same tone, on the same page, with the same confidence. The reader has no way to tell them apart, so they either trust all of it or none of it. Both responses are wrong, and both are expensive.

This report labels every claim. You can see at a glance which sentences rest on a primary source, which repeat a vendor's marketing, which are somebody's estimate with an undisclosed method, and which are my judgment. Where the evidence is thin, the report says so instead of writing around it.

Seven things this report does that most don't

01

Every claim is labeled

Six labels: verified fact, vendor claim, third-party estimate, my assessment, hypothesis, and scenario. If a sentence can't be labeled it's either filler or a claim being smuggled in, so it gets cut.

02

Sources are typed by provenance

Numbered, clickable, and tagged by what they are: vendor primary, peer-reviewed, analyst firm, independent press, self-selected practitioner survey, or second-hand and unverified. A source list where the weak entries are visibly weak is more useful than one where everything looks equally solid.

03

Assumptions come first, not last

Every premise the analysis rests on is stated up front, each one naming which conclusions fail if it turns out to be wrong. You can disagree with a premise and know exactly what that costs you.

04

No forecasts

Point forecasts in a fast-moving category are decoration. You get scenarios with stated probabilities and, more importantly, observable tripwires: specific events you can watch for without private information, each one telling you which scenario is playing out.

05

A section on what it cannot answer

The questions that need primary research get named rather than papered over. This is usually the most useful page in the document.

06

A stated half-life

Which claims decay in six months, which in twelve, and which are architectural. If you pick the report up a year later you know how to discount it.

07

Charts carry evidence labels too

Every figure is tagged like body text, with a caption that names the weakness in the underlying data. A chart built from vendor self-reporting says so on its face.

A full assessment, start to finish

Twenty pages on the executive and business coaching category. It takes apart published market sizing that ranges across two orders of magnitude for the same market, derives practitioner utilization from figures the industry publishes but never divides against each other, and declines to use the most widely repeated statistic in the category because it has no traceable source. It was built with no client brief and no interviews, which is the point. This is what the process produces from public sources alone.

It stands alone, or it opens something larger

Some of these are bought as the whole engagement. A board needs a defensible read on a category before it commits capital, or a founder needs to know whether the market they've described to investors actually exists at the size they've claimed. The report is the deliverable and the work ends there.

The rest become discovery. A fixed-scope, fixed-price assessment is a cheaper and more honest way to start than a discovery phase billed by the hour, because you own a finished artifact either way. If the work continues into architecture, advisory, or a build, the assessment fee credits against the first invoice of that engagement.

One assessment, scoped to your question

It's one comprehensive report, not a menu of tiers. Every assessment runs the full method above and adapts to the subject, whether that's a market, a category, or a named set of vendors. It's quoted as a fixed fee against a signed scope, never billed by the hour.

15 to 25 pages · Word + PDF
The assessment

The full report on your chosen subject: stated assumptions, structure and sizing with reasons to discount it, facts separated from vendor claims, scenarios with observable tripwires, a section on what it cannot answer, and a stated half-life. Delivered in ten business days from a signed scope.

Assessment + working session
Discovery

The assessment, plus a two-hour working session on what the findings mean for your specific decision, and a short written recommendation. The fee credits in full against a follow-on engagement in another pillar.

Primary interviews are not included by default and are priced separately. The sample report says plainly that no interviews were conducted, and every report will say the same when that's true.

What this is not

This is not Gartner. There is no research staff behind it, no proprietary panel, no syndicated dataset. It's one practitioner with thirty years in enterprise technology, reading public sources carefully and telling you exactly how much weight each one holds.

It will not tell you a market is bigger than the evidence supports, and if the honest answer is that the published numbers can't be reconciled, that's what the report says. Anyone who needs a document confirming a decision that's already been made should buy it somewhere else.

Turnaround is ten business days from a signed scope. Rush is possible and costs more, and I'll tell you when rushing would make the work worse.

Commission an assessment

Tell me the market and the decision behind it. If a report is the wrong tool for what you're actually trying to work out, I'll say so before either of us commits.

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