Consulting & AdvisoryFree
Market Assessment With Beliefs on Record
Every belief about the market gets a named owner, a date, a grade against outside evidence, and a number for what holding it costs.
River records what the client believes about their market before it goes looking for anything. Each belief comes back with the name of the person who said it, the date they said it, and their own words rather than your summary. Then every one is graded against outside evidence and priced. Beside that sits a competitor sheet whose axes are derived from what can be observed, not from the three dimensions the client already believes they lead on.
Search the query and page one is a market assessment framework. A total addressable market funnel, a competitor grid, five forces, a growth rate cited to a press release about a report nobody has read. Every one of them assesses the market. Not one of them has a place to write down what the client thinks the market is, which is the thing the engagement will collide with in week three when the findings contradict the person who hired you.
Built for the consultant who has four weeks to tell a founder something about his own market that he will not want to hear. It takes the cost picture from the savings ledger and the operating view from the operating diagnostic, and what survives is scored inside a diagnostic pack. Reach for it before a growth plan, ahead of a capital decision, or any time a client's confidence about their market is doing more work than their evidence.
Why the axes matter more than the grid
A competitor grid is only as good as the columns you chose, and clients choose columns they already win on. Kestrel wanted accuracy, reliability and service. Every vendor's own literature claims all three, none is observable from outside, and all three flatter the incumbent. The government's own method for defining a market from evidence is published. The 2023 Merger Guidelines identify a market from observed characteristics: distinct customers, distinct prices, peculiar characteristics and uses, and specialized vendors.
The second trap is the market growth rate itself. It is the most invented number in consulting, because a client expects one and no free source will give you one for a segment this narrow. The honest move is to grade it untestable and substitute something dated. EPA's seventh needs survey puts drinking water infrastructure need at $625 billion over twenty years, $107 billion of it treatment, and it is what state revolving fund money is allocated against.
Kestrel Controls, a family-owned instrumentation maker on $68m, six beliefs recorded before anybody opened a file. Sales said the losses were price. Joining 447 quotes to quoted lead time put the loss rate at 33.9 percent under four weeks and 70.8 percent over six, while the discount conceded on the wins climbed from 6.2 to 14.1 percent. They were discounting harder on the slow quotes and losing them anyway. Of the six beliefs, evidence supported one.
How it works
Record the beliefs
Whatever they told you about their market, in their words, with names and dates attached.
Send the data
The quote history, the installed base, the service contracts, and whatever the distributors report.
Read the grades
One row per belief, with the evidence that settled it and what it costs.
Test a grade
Ask what would change a verdict, or drop in the award records you just found.
What you get
- Every belief recorded with the name of whoever said it and the date
- The client's own words on the row, so the argument stays about the evidence
- A grade on each one: contradicted, supported, expired, or not testable at all
- The cost of holding a wrong belief, priced from the client's own quote data
- Competitor axes derived from what outsiders can observe rather than what the client claims
- Any figure nobody can source marked untestable instead of quietly given a number
Common questions
Why record the beliefs before gathering evidence?
Because a register written afterwards is a record of what you decided to disagree with. Written first, it is their sentence with their name on it, and the meeting is about the evidence rather than about whether you understood them. Kestrel's six beliefs went on the page on 14 March, before anyone opened a file.
Is telling a client they are wrong not a fast way to get fired?
Telling them without evidence is. The register makes it their belief against a source, not their judgement against yours, and one of Kestrel's six came back supported. A page where every belief was wrong reads as a consultant looking for something to sell. Three of six is a finding they can act on.
What does the expired grade mean?
That the belief was true when it formed and nobody re-tested it. The Kestrel COO was right in 2019 that switching cost kept customers in place. Trentmoor now publishes retrofit adapters for both of Kestrel's common mounting patterns. No market assessment framework has a slot for a belief with a date on it.
The client wants a market growth number. What do I give them?
Whatever you can source, and the word untestable where you cannot. For Kestrel there is no free figure for flow instrumentation in municipal water, so the register says so and substitutes the federal needs survey, which is dated, breaks down by state, and is what grant money is allocated against.
How do you price what a belief costs?
From the client's own data, where it reaches. Kestrel's price belief was costing $451,836 a year in discount attributable to lead time, plus about 63 losses a year above the short-lead baseline rate. Where the data will not carry a number the row says unpriced, which is different from saying zero.
Who picks the axes on the competitor sheet?
The evidence does. Kestrel asked for accuracy, reliability and service, which are three axes every competitor also claims and no outsider can check. The sheet uses distinct customers, distinct prices, the approvals a product needs to be specified, and which distributors carry which line. Comparability work sits in the graded comparator sheet.
Where does this sit in the engagement?
First week, and the register goes up before the kickoff meeting ends. The beliefs set the questions everything else has to answer, and the grades are what the closing meeting is about. Before a contract exists at all, the bounded free scan is the version that stops at the question. What survives feeds the findings and recommendations set with the source attached.
Market Assessment With Beliefs on Record
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