Five sectors, five different disguises.
Commercial systems fail in recognisable patterns, but the pattern surfaces differently depending on what you sell and who you sell it to. These five sectors are the ones worked most often, not the limit of where the method applies.
Pick the one closest to what you sell.
Software & IT Services
Fast stage transitions and short memory. The motion that opens one growth stage rarely survives the next, and the system usually breaks before anyone has time to notice which part. IT services teams selling delivery capacity around the software carry the same pattern at a different pace.
Banking & Insurance
Long cycles, heavy compliance, and multiple internal stakeholders on every deal. Dysfunction hides inside process rather than inside speed, in handoffs between relationship, product, and risk that nobody owns end to end, and fintech, payments, and lending carry the same handoffs at a faster pace.
Industrial & Manufacturing
Technical products, long relationships, and a commercial function that often grew alongside engineering rather than as a designed system, so territory and coverage tend to reflect history rather than opportunity.
Advisory & Services
Selling capacity and expertise rather than a product, which makes commercial dysfunction and delivery dysfunction hard to separate, especially where project work, retainers, and new-business winning all pull against each other. BPO operations add the same tension at larger scale.
Energy & Climate Tech
Very long sales cycles, buying committees split across technical and commercial roles, and revenue arriving as both one-off projects and recurring service, with regulatory and grid timing layered on top of all of it. Renewables and climate tech ventures sit inside the same cycle, usually earlier-stage, and energy software vendors sell into the same buying committees from the outside.
The method looks at the commercial system, not the sector. If your sector is not listed, what determines fit is whether the system is under strain, not which industry it sits in.
Where the method does not apply well.
This is built for B2B commercial systems with a defined sales motion and enough history to read. It applies poorly to pure self-serve businesses with no sales function, to pre-revenue companies with no commercial system to diagnose, and to organisations where nobody with authority is prepared to change how the commercial team works. In those cases the diagnostic will produce an accurate number that nothing is done with, which is an expensive outcome.
Sector changes the surface, not the method.
The six dysfunction families and the six financial consequence components do not change between a SaaS company and a manufacturer. 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 sector alone.
Before you assume you are not a fit.
We are not in one of the five listed sectors, can we still work with you?
We are pre-revenue with no sales team yet, is the diagnostic useful for us?
We sell across more than one of these sectors, which page applies to us?
Does company size matter more than sector?
Three ways to keep going.
See it by growth stage instead
Five stages, five different constraints, whatever sector you sit in.
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 sector 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