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Which instrument do you need?
Five questions, and three more if the answer turns out to be a seat rather than a sprint. Three minutes, nothing to send us, no email required. The most expensive mistake in this category is not choosing the wrong instrument — it is buying three months of the right-sounding one against the wrong finding.
Answer as it is
Not as you would like it to read.
Not a sprint. Somebody has to be in the chair.
Advice will not fix what you have described. The question now is which seat, and it is answered wrong more often than it is answered late — a team concludes it needs a commercial hire when the finding is that the founder never handed over the buyer relationships, or a fund buys three months of facilitation when the chair is simply empty.
Three more questions. They ask what is actually missing, what the next event is, and what the team already has. Those three distinguish between five quite different seats.
This is a routing tool, not an assessment. It is answered from memory in three minutes and nothing in it is verified. It tells you what to ask for; it does not tell you whether a company is fundable.
Why this exists
The misdiagnosis is the expensive part.
The same symptom points at different instruments. A pipeline that will not convert can be a commercial problem, a founder who owns every relationship, a decision nobody has made, or a company nobody has to buy from — and those need four different things.
The one we see misdiagnosed most often runs the other way. A team concludes they need a commercial hire when the finding is that the founder has not handed over the buyer relationships, which is a Momentum question. Or a fund buys three months of coaching when the honest answer is that the seat is empty and no amount of facilitation fills it.
This tool is deliberately blunt. It weighs your answers across five outcomes and names the one that carries the most weight. Where it lands on a seat, it goes further and names which seat — because hire a fractional is not advice, and hire a fractional CTO rather than a commercial lead, and here is why is.
Whether that seat is filled fractionally or on an interim basis is left to a conversation. It turns on notice periods, whether there is a permanent hire to hand over to, and whether the board wants someone with no career stake in the outcome. None of that survives a multiple-choice question.
What it is not
Same boundary as the checklists.
This routes. It does not assess. Nothing here is verified, nothing is scored against evidence, and no answer is checked against anything but itself.
An assessment answers a different question — should this position be taken, at what size, against what reserve — across twenty-four dimensions, each carrying a grade recording where the evidence came from rather than how good the news was. Three weeks, commissioned by the fund.