Everything Halo Strategic does is built around a small number of practical commercial frameworks. Not templates. Not theory. The same structures, used consistently across every Diagnostic, Audit, and piece of writing, so a founder-led business can see exactly how a recommendation was reached.
Diagnosis before prescription. Always.
Every framework below exists to serve one sentence. Before any recommendation, product, or piece of content is created at Halo, it's checked against this: does it assume diagnosis happens first, or does it quietly skip to prescription? See the reasoning behind it on How Halo Thinks.
Each one is documented in full in Halo's own internal constitution before it ever became a page. Nothing here was created to fill a gap on this site — it existed first, and is being formalised, not invented.
The four-term causal chain behind every Halo diagnosis, in sequence.
See the sequence →Seven stages describing how Halo actually diagnoses and improves a business.
See the seven stages →Six areas where value quietly escapes a business, each with its own diagnostic question.
See the six areas →Seven functional domains, cross-checked against the Leakage Framework, honest about what's still thin.
See the seven domains →Five levels defined by the quality of commercial decision-making, not revenue or headcount.
Read the full breakdown →Four universal measures of commercial capability, distinct from business-specific engagement metrics.
Read the full breakdown →How the Commercial Diagnostic and Commercial Audit actually run, stage by stage.
See both processes →You observe leakage, trace it to friction, find the constraint causing that friction, remove it, and the result is alignment. Alignment isn't a fifth item on the list, it's what the other three, done in order, produce.
Where value escapes the business. Lost opportunities, visible in the numbers.
What's causing the leakage. Processes that slow momentum, misalignment between functions.
The bottleneck that matters most. The single thing to remove first.
A business whose systems reinforce each other instead of working against each other.
Seven stages. The first three are the diagnostic sequence. The next three turn diagnosis into a confirmed result. The seventh acknowledges that alignment is maintained, not finished.
Identify commercial leakage — where value is escaping.
Understand the friction creating that leakage.
Identify the primary constraint.
Bring leadership, sales, marketing and operations around the constraint.
Implement the highest-leverage changes.
Confirm whether friction has reduced and alignment has improved.
Growth is continuous. New constraints emerge.
Every stage is grounded against a real Selected Engagement, not asserted in the abstract.
Most revenue doesn't disappear in one dramatic failure. It leaks through a dozen small, unowned handoffs between departments — a slow response to a new lead, a CRM nobody trusts enough to use properly, a reporting gap that means two departments are arguing over two different numbers.
| Constraint area | Diagnostic question |
|---|---|
| Commercial Strategy | Is there one growth plan leadership agrees on, and do the unit economics actually support it? |
| Acquisition Systems | Which channels produce customers, versus which produce leads that never convert? |
| Conversion & Sales Systems | How long between a lead arriving and a human actually engaging it? |
| Operations & CRM Systems | Does the CRM reflect what's actually happening, or is it a system nobody trusts? |
| Retention & Client Experience | What's the real churn rate, against what the business believes it is? |
| Decision & Reporting Systems | Does leadership have one trusted number per key metric, or six different versions of the same one? |
This is the framework behind the Halo Score, the scored output of a Commercial Audit — every pillar scored on evidence quality, performance gap, and commercial leverage.
The practical, diagnostic-tool version of the framework above: seven functional domains instead of six commercial areas, cross-checked so both read the same business through two different lenses. Two domains are still honestly thin — shown as open, not papered over with an invented example.
| Domain | Diagnostic question | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Leadership | Does leadership agree on one growth plan, or is every function quietly working to its own version of "growth"? | Evidenced |
| Marketing | Are channels producing customers, or leads that never convert? | Evidenced |
| Sales | What happens to a lead in the first hour it arrives? | Evidenced |
| Customer Experience | When a customer leaves, does anyone find out why? | Open — thin evidence |
| Operations | Does the CRM reflect what's actually happening, or is it a system nobody trusts? | Evidenced |
| Data & Reporting | If two people pulled the same metric today, would they get the same number? | Evidenced |
| Finance | Not yet evidenced — no Selected Engagement framed around pricing, margin, or cash flow. | Open — placeholder |
One 90-minute session, identifying your primary commercial constraint. No promise to fix anything — the promise is clarity.
See the full process →Three to six weeks, a full evidence-based investigation across all six Commercial Leakage areas, scored via the Halo Score.
See the full process →These frameworks aren't static. Growth Maturity Model and Halo Indicators already have full write-ups on Insights. The Diagnostic Language, Master Framework, Leakage Framework, and Friction Map are documented here in full for the first time. As real engagements add evidence to the open areas above, this page gets more precise, not longer for its own sake.
See where your business sits — Start with a Commercial Diagnostic