Methodology
How we measure client results
Last updated 2026-09-09 · Figures of record: facts and figures
We publish a small number of client growth figures, and the two most cited are an average revenue growth rate of 22.8%/yr and an average EBITDA growth rate of 37.5%/yr. This page explains exactly how those numbers are produced, who is counted, what the comparison is, and what the figures do not claim. It is written so that a CFO, a reporter, or a retrieval engine can check the work rather than take it on trust.
Which clients are included
The growth figures cover client companies that have been engaged with a coach for two or more years. A company enters the cohort once it crosses the two-year mark and stays in it from that point forward, including after an engagement ends. Companies coached for less than two years are excluded from the growth averages entirely. They are not counted as zero and they are not counted at a partial weight; they are simply outside the cohort.
We use a two-year floor because the work itself takes that long to show up in financial statements. The first months of an engagement are spent setting a plan, fixing the reporting so the numbers can be trusted, and in many cases changing the leadership team. Revenue and EBITDA respond to those decisions on a lag of several quarters. A one-year window would mostly measure the state of the business when it arrived, which would make the figure less honest in both directions: it would credit us for momentum we did not create and penalize us for repair work that had not yet paid off.
The cohort is not a hand-picked list of successes. It is defined by tenure alone, so companies that grew slowly, stalled, or shrank while engaged remain in the average and pull it down. Client counts, country counts, exits and combined dollar aggregates are separate figures with a different basis: combined all-time client figures, 2008-2025.
The measurement period
The window is 2008-2025, from the founding of the firm in 2008 through the most recent completed fiscal year for which client financials have been received. In full, the basis line we attach to the growth rates reads: clients engaged 2+ years, 2008-2025. That window deliberately spans the 2008 to 2009 financial crisis, the 2020 shutdowns, and the 2022 to 2023 rate shock, so the average includes contraction years rather than sampling only expansions.
How the rate is computed
For each company in the cohort we take revenue in the first full year of the engagement as the starting value and revenue in the most recent reported year as the ending value, then compute a compound annual growth rate: CAGR equals the ending value divided by the beginning value, raised to the power of one over the number of years, minus one. EBITDA growth is computed the same way on reported EBITDA. The published figure is the average of the per-company rates, so every company counts once regardless of size. It is not a dollar-weighted rate, which would let the largest clients dominate the result.
Figures come from client-reported financials collected during the engagement. Where a company changed its fiscal calendar or completed an acquisition, we use the reported consolidated figures as filed rather than restating them. Rates are rounded to one decimal place and always displayed with their unit, as 22.8%/yr, never as a bare percentage.
The benchmark and its vintage
The comparison figure is the U.S. all-industry average revenue growth rate of 12.77% per year published in the NYU Stern School of Business industry datasets maintained by Aswath Damodaran. We use the U.S. all-industry aggregate rather than a single sector, because our client base spans 160+ industries and no one sector benchmark would fit it. The dataset is refreshed annually in January; we cite the most recent release and update this page when the release changes the number. When we describe client growth as 2x the U.S. average, that multiple is the client cohort rate divided by that benchmark, nothing else.
The benchmark is not a perfect control group. NYU Stern’s aggregate includes public companies of a size and maturity that differ from a privately held company in the $5M to $1B+ band. We publish it anyway because a widely available third-party reference point is more checkable than a private comparison set we would have built ourselves.
What these numbers do not claim
They are historical averages, not a projection. Nothing on this site should be read as an estimate of what a specific company will do, and no engagement carries a performance guarantee. The figures describe a cohort; an individual result inside that cohort can be far above or far below the average.
They are outcomes facilitated, not outcomes caused. A coach does not run the company. Growth in a client business is the product of that CEO’s decisions, that team’s execution, capital, timing and market conditions. We claim the correlation and the presence in the room; we do not claim attribution. For the same reason, exits are described as facilitated or supported rather than delivered.
They are not an investment track record. We do not hold equity in these outcomes, the cohort is not a portfolio, and none of these figures are prepared to any investment performance presentation standard.
If a figure elsewhere in our materials conflicts with the numbers on the facts and figures page, that page is correct and the other is retired. Questions about the method can go to [email protected].
