Sixteen metrics, one number
How we score a company's health

A portfolio of ten products produces a few hundred numbers a month. Revenue, margin, cash, churn, activation, ticket volume, release cadence. Every one of them is true, and together they say nothing, because a board meeting has forty minutes and a human eye can hold about five figures at once.

So we built one number. The Health Index takes sixteen metrics across eight pillars, from market traction and financial health to unit economics, risk, team and strategic fit, and turns them into a score from 0 to 100. Each metric is normalised against fixed thresholds: thirty percent monthly growth is a hundred, negative growth is zero, a burn multiple under one is a hundred. Four of the sixteen are scored by hand on a ten-point scale. The weights are set per company: traction and financial health carry the most, because they are the ones that end companies, and a metric that does not apply to a company drops out, its weight flowing to the rest of its pillar.

The score alone would be a black box, and black boxes get ignored. So every score comes with an explanation written by a language model from the underlying numbers: which three metrics moved it, in which direction, since when. The explanation is what people actually read. The number is what they compare.

What it does not do: it does not decide. It tells a partner where to look first on Monday. Three companies at 40 get the call; the one at 85 gets left alone. That is the whole point of a score, to spend attention where it changes something.

The same construction works for any business that has more numbers than attention: a chain of clinics, a dealer group, a marketplace with a hundred sellers. Sixteen is not a magic count. It is how many metrics survived the question “would a decision change if this one moved?”