The ClarIQ Benchmark Brief
An annual look at what healthy actually looks like in businesses doing $1M to $20M. The first edition is out: four numbers, every one naming its source, and the move each one demands. Sign up below and it arrives by email.
Owners of businesses this size have almost nothing to compare themselves to. Public company data is irrelevant at this scale, and the surveys that do exist are thin, stale, or built to sell something. The brief exists to close that gap: what the money numbers look like at this size, where the healthy operators separate from the strained ones, and what to do about the line that stings. As the monthly reporting practice grows, future editions add anonymized, aggregated comparisons drawn from that work, with one standing rule: every number names its source.
What the first edition covers
- Cash: how many days the median business survives if revenue stops this morning
- Speed: the customers you already paid to win, lost to slow follow-up
- Margin: the slow bleed you cannot feel month to month
- Exit math: what a business this size is really worth when the question turns real
Straight talk on how it was built: first editions have to earn trust, so this one uses only named public research and our own stated standards. Nothing in it is invented, and nothing is a client's private data. It reads as education, not lending, legal, or investment advice, and no client will ever be identifiable in any edition.