About
A fixed reference for business support.
Business support is delivered through many programmes, with different measures and reporting requirements. That makes results difficult to compare. Growth Score provides a common instrument, published and versioned, for measuring commercial capability and movement.
The Growth Score standard is published and maintained by Closing Foundry Ltd, registered in England and Wales, company number 14629519.
It began as an instrument built for Scottish Enterprise. The question has remained practical: what does a company need to build, and where might support help it move?
Partner organisations may license the instrument and deliver it under their own brand. A conformant implementation runs the published method at a stated version and identifies that version.
Why this exists
A measure of a company ought to be useful to the company being measured.
A useful result should help the company decide what to work on next.
For twenty-five years, the work has been practical: sit with a founder or revenue team, identify the constraint and help them address it. Across enough companies, patterns repeat: the same commercial disciplines, in different orders and at different stages.
There was no consistent way to show which company had which constraint without spending a week finding out. There was also no common way to review movement afterwards.
Then a development agency asked a practical question: among the companies it supported, who needed what, and what changed afterwards?
What we found when we looked
One
Outcome measures often arrive after the decision
Revenue, filings, jobs and funding are real outcomes. They often describe decisions made months earlier, when the immediate opportunity to change the underlying position has passed.
Two
Many scores answer someone else’s question
A score may help decide whether to lend, invest or contract. Those are useful questions, but they differ from asking what the company should work on next. Growth Score is designed to give the company a usable result as well as an institutional view.
Three
There is a structural reason
Product usage and digital footprints can often be collected without a company’s active participation. Commercial capability is different: the instrument needs the company to provide evidence, and the company needs a reason to do so.
That suggested three design requirements: free for the company; separate from decisions about the company; and published in full so anyone can inspect the method. Growth Score is built around those boundaries.
That is the purpose of Growth Score.
Who builds and maintains it
Built and maintained by operators who have done the work it measures.
The method was developed by operators who have worked with founders, revenue teams and the commercial disciplines it measures. The judgement in the sixteen cells comes from that practice and is published for inspection.
Charles Talbot
Founder
Built the instrument and owns the method. Twenty-five years in sales, including work on the shift from founder-led selling to a repeatable motion: stage exits, qualification, deal control and the operating rhythm behind forecast accuracy. Writes the specification and version record.
Douglas Mancini
Senior Operating Partner
Leads enterprise go-to-market turnarounds across the UK, Ireland and EMEA. Rebuilds teams and establishes pipeline-to-forecast rigour. Shapes the Closing and Control parts of the diagnosis, including the distinction between process and proposition.
Laurie Mascott
Senior Operating Partner
Works across data platforms, knowledge management and new-market entry in EMEA, the USA and APAC. Works with companies building a first repeatable motion; the pre-revenue and early-revenue levels draw on that experience.
Joao Pedro Moniz Barreto
Operating Partner
Spent twelve years as the sole EMEA lead for a US DevOps platform, selling to CIOs, engineering leaders and compliance functions in regulated industries, with ninety per cent retention over a decade. Leads technical and assurance reviews, a critical part of institutional deployment.
The bench
Specialists, by problem
Beyond the core operators, the bench includes specialists in US go-to-market, marketing, customer success, services, fintech, enterprise sales and market expansion. People are selected for the problem at hand rather than placed on every engagement.
The commercial conflict is stated plainly.
Closing Foundry also sells revenue execution consultancy, including work in categories that Growth Score may indicate. The potential conflict is declared here so the boundary can be inspected.
The separation works as follows.
- The diagnosis is deterministic. Commercial input does not change the score, stage or indicated root cause. The arithmetic is published and the conformance vectors allow an implementation to be checked.
- The diagnosis indicates a category of support, not a named provider. Provider selection remains with the institution, subject to its own procurement and governance.
- Licensees choose and record their own provision, including internal teams, framework suppliers and programmes.
- Any provider owned by or affiliated with Closing Foundry is disclosed, including Closing Foundry itself.
- Consultancy is separately contracted. It is not bundled into a licence or required as a condition of one.
Five commitments
- The instrument remains a measurement instrument. It does not make credit, funding, eligibility or investment decisions about a company.
- Companies are not charged for taking the measure or receiving the result.
- The method is published in full. Each released version has a version record and a public address.
- We work with the people already doing the job. Advisers, accelerators and programmes keep their client relationships and fees; they choose and deliver the support. Growth Score supplies the measurement layer.
- Unverified figures are labelled. This includes current figures that are too early for benchmarking.