Five stages, five different constraints.
The system that produced results at one growth stage becomes the constraint at the next. The dysfunction families stay the same, but which one carries the load changes as the company grows.
Pick the one closest to where you are.
Pre-PMF
Before a repeatable sales motion exists. The founder is still testing who the buyer is and what they will pay for, so there is often not yet a system stable enough for the diagnostic to read.
Early Growth
A repeatable motion exists, but it lives in the founder rather than in a system anyone else can run. The founder is usually still the best seller, and the cost is everything that does not happen because of that.
Scale-Up
A single founder-led motion has to split into roles that can be repeated by people who did not invent it. What a small team handled through direct conversation does not survive role separation automatically.
Expansion
A working commercial motion gets multiplied across new territories, segments, or teams, and the operating model that carried the first one has to travel with it, not just the people.
Enterprise
The system is mature and the dysfunction is expensive precisely because it is stable. Nobody is in crisis, which is why the loss compounds quietly for years before anyone prices it.
Stage changes the surface, not the method.
The six dysfunction families and the six financial consequence components do not change between an early-stage team and an enterprise one. What changes is which family carries the most load and how it disguises itself. That is what the diagnostic is for, and it is why the answer is not knowable in advance from the stage alone.
Before you assume you know your stage.
How do you know which growth stage we are actually in?
Does company size matter more than growth stage?
We feel like we are between two stages, which page applies?
Can a company move backward a stage, not just forward?
Three ways to keep going.
See it by sector instead
Five sectors, five different disguises, whatever stage you sit at.
See what gets measured
The six families, the signals that reveal them, and how each one turns into cost.
Find out where you sit
Ten questions, two minutes. A first read on which part of your system is carrying the most strain.
The stage tells you where to look. It does not tell you what it costs.
One call, 30 minutes. We will review what is working, what is stalling, and where the cost is actually sitting. You will leave with a concrete next step, whether that is Kihon Labs or not.
Book a diagnostic call