05Predict
Most businesses plan from last year’s results and react to the current month.
The British Business Bank reports that around half of smaller businesses used or sought external finance in 2025, with increased use of flexible facilities to support cash flow. Cash is the decision most often made with the worst information.
British Business Bank, Small Business Finance Markets Report 2026, 17 March 2026
Predict in practice
We start from the decision, not the model. A forecast that does not change a decision is simply more reporting.
The sales forecast is defended rather than trusted, and the cash position is known accurately only once a month, usually too late to act on.
Our approach
Which decisions are being made badly or late, what would have to be known to make them better, and whether the data behind that is trustworthy enough to rely on. A forecast that does not change a decision is simply more reporting.
Our experience
We have built and governed decision systems where being wrong carries a real cost: trading and market risk, credit and portfolio exposure, demand and capacity in asset-heavy operations. Those environments taught us to distrust a model that cannot show its working.
What we do as owner
Which decisions are being made late or badly, and what would have to be known to make them better.
- Sales and demand forecasting, built from the pipeline rather than last year plus a percentage
- Cash forecasting and liquidity planning, weekly rather than monthly
- Customer renewal, churn and retention signals
- Inventory, capacity and supplier lead times
- Maintenance and asset intervention
- Pricing and margin, where it is holding and where it is eroding
- Labour and capacity planning against demand
- Data quality, lineage and ownership
- One agreed definition of each measure, so the numbers stop being argued about
- Early-warning indicators and exception reporting
- Scenarios and sensitivity for the board
- Back-testing: does the forecast turn out to be right
- Decision records, so the forecast improves from what happened
- Reporting built around decisions rather than around available data
- Dashboards the management team uses without asking for help
- The forecast in the management meeting, not in a separate pack
- Training so the numbers are understood as well as received
- Trading, market and credit exposure, where being wrong has a price
- Demand and capacity in asset-heavy operations
- Portfolio and concentration risk across a group
- Model governance in regulated environments
For owners who are not seeking a sale, the same capability is available as an executive mandate through Advisory.