Software & Technology
Fast stage transitions and short institutional memory. The motion that opens one growth stage rarely survives the next.
Read the sector →Who we helpIndustries
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 distinct operating contexts, not a limit.
By sector
Pick the one closest to what you sell.
Five surfaces, one method. Each page reads how the strain shows up, what tends to break first, and where the evidence usually sits.
Financial Services
Long cycles and heavy compliance. Dysfunction hides inside process, in handoffs between relationship, product and risk that nobody owns end to end.
Read the sector →Industrial & Manufacturing
Technical products and long relationships, sold by a commercial function that grew alongside engineering rather than by design.
Read the sector →Professional Services
Capacity and expertise sold instead of a product, which makes commercial dysfunction and delivery dysfunction hard to separate.
Read the sector →Energy & Utilities
Very long cycles, split technical and commercial buying committees and revenue arriving as both projects and recurring service.
Read the sector →Not listed? The method reads the commercial system, not the sector. What determines fit is whether the system is under strain, not which industry it sits in.
Across all of it
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 load and how it disguises itself, which is why the sector alone cannot answer it in advance.
- KKey breakLocate
- IInputsEvidence
- HHidden costConsequence
- OOrderSequence
- NNamed ownersTransfer
Honest fit
Where the method does not apply well.
Pure self-serve
With no sales function there is no commercial motion to read, and the dysfunction sits elsewhere in the business.
Pre-revenue
There is not yet a commercial system to diagnose, so the evidence is too thin to set a baseline.
No authority to change
Where nobody with authority is prepared to change how the commercial team works, the roadmap has nothing to act behind it.
Not sure? Test the fit in one call →
Where to go next
Three ways to keep going.
See it by growth stage instead
Five stages, five different constraints, whatever sector you sit in.
Compare growth stages →See what gets measured
The six families, the signals that reveal them and how each one turns into cost.
Explore the Diagnosis →Find out where you sit
Ten questions, two minutes. A first read on which part of your system is carrying the most strain.
Take the Strain Check → FAQ
Industries FAQs.
We are not in one of the five listed sectors, can we still work with you?
Yes. The five sectors listed represent distinct operating contexts, not a restriction.
We are pre-revenue with no sales team yet, is the diagnostic useful for us?
Not yet. The method needs an existing commercial system to read, and a pre-revenue company usually has too little history for the diagnosis to find a pattern.
We sell across more than one of these sectors, which page applies to us?
Whichever one carries the most revenue or the most strain, as a starting point. The diagnostic reads your actual system rather than a single sector page, so the engagement adapts once it begins.
Does company size matter more than sector?
Growth stage matters more than either. A ten-person team and a much larger one in the same sector can be carrying the same coordination pattern, just at different volumes.
Get started
The sector tells you where to look. It does not tell you what it costs.
Use 30 minutes to define the operating question, test what evidence exists and decide whether Kihon has a role at all. No scope is proposed before that is clear.
Discuss the operating problem