Defensibility is claimed everywhere and measured nowhere.

For fourteen years I used Jobs-to-Be-Done, Outcome-Driven Innovation, and beachhead strategy to help companies understand their markets. That work explained demand. It explained entry. It explained market movement.

It didn't explain Kroo.

I worked on beachhead strategy with Kroo Bank early on, and the market work was right — Kroo went on to pass 200,000 users and £1bn in banking deposits. Real insight, clear entry logic, strong execution. And the company still hit a strategic stall and had to pivot. If the demand read was sound and the beachhead logic held, why was the position still exposed?

That question bothered me. It took two years to answer properly.

The answer: product-market fit is not the final threshold before scale. There is another gate. The first gate asks whether there is demand. The second asks whether the position will hold — whether the structure underneath the growth is deep enough to carry the next level of capital, complexity, and expectation. It's the question Sequoia puts to every company it meets: “Why will it endure?” We built a whole testing discipline for the first gate. For the second, the field has description — but almost no method you can actually run.

That gap is what I research, and what I diagnose.

Before this was a thesis, it was a research practice — and the study stands on it.

I've spent 17+ years leading evidence-based research in complex, regulated environments: major UK government transformation programmes, including HM Land Registry and the Department for Education, where research had to survive Treasury-grade scrutiny, formal ethics and consent standards, and the test of real operational decisions — not a pitch meeting. That practice is where the study's discipline comes from: non-leading instrument design, purposive sampling, independent replication of research passes, second-coder reliability checks, and stating the limits of a finding as plainly as the finding.

I've also taught it. More than ten years teaching research methods and innovation at postgraduate level, including supervising at the University of Warwick and delivering the MSc innovation module in Hong Kong, Thailand, and Malaysia — and a co-authored book on entrepreneurship published by Sage.

The other half of the foundation is a decade of strategy under uncertainty: beachhead work with Kroo, corporate innovation for Jaguar Land Rover, Pfizer, Just Eat, and Ryanair — grounded in Jobs-to-Be-Done and Ulwick's ODI, identifying and quantifying market opportunities valued from £100m to £550m+ — alongside ten years investigating and teaching disruptive innovation theory.

The strategic read and the research rigour to test it. That combination is uncommon, and it's the foundation of everything below.

The question — what makes a company durable, and can it be read early? — deserved more than a framework and a point of view. So it's being answered as formal research, in two parts, published in sequence:

Part 1 — how the field assesses durability today. How investors understand, communicate, and reason about whether a company will last: the published literature across three traditions, a coded corpus of fund communications from 24 UK and US funds, and confidential practitioner interviews with the investors who personally make the call. Part 1 publishes first.

Part 2 — what a structural read can know, and when it's right. Part 1 establishes the standard and how practice relates to it; Part 2 builds on those findings to test what is actually knowable about a company's durability early — against matched pairs of companies that started in the same market at the same moment and diverged, and against dated, locked reads of live companies whose outcomes aren't settled yet. The discipline throughout is exposure, not prediction: stated limits are part of the method.

The read that comes out of this work sits beneath the frameworks boards already trust — Ulwick's ODI, Helmer's 7 Powers, Porter — and is built to be tested, not asserted.

I don't pick winners — I move the distribution. I can't promise a founder they'll win; no one honestly can. What I can do is read whether the structure under the growth is genuinely forming — early enough to act on it. Before the raise, not in the middle of diligence.

And sometimes the honest answer is that the deep structure isn't there to build. I'll say that plainly too, because a founder who stops spending toward an outcome the structure can't reach can often build a genuinely good business at the outcome it can. Every other incentive in the system points the other way. Mine doesn't.

A fit: post-product-market-fit companies approaching a capital event — typically seed to pre-Series A or B — with real, paying traction. Strongest fit: B2B SaaS, consumer brands, digital health, and marketplaces. UK-based; I work across Europe and the US.

Not a fit: pre-revenue companies, or founders looking for general mentoring.

The book is in editorial review. Part 1 of the study is in fieldwork. The thinking is public in the essays. And the advisory work continues where it started — with a company that has something real to diagnose and a specific decision on the near horizon.

If you want to know whether your growth is durable or just fast — whether your company will endure — the work starts with a read of your structure.