Stress-Testing Your Business Model Before the Market Does
A structured 4-week process to find the assumptions your business is built on — and test whether they still hold
Who this is for
SMEs that have been operating for 3 or more years with a model that has not been formally reviewed — and founders who sense that the market is shifting but have not yet mapped what that means for their unit economics.
What it costs you to ignore it
The diagnosis behind it
This playbook is triggered by a Red or Critical finding on:
Vital 1 — Strategy & DirectionThe Protocol
Map your current business model on one page: customer segments, value proposition, revenue streams, key costs, and key dependencies (suppliers, people, platforms)
List the top 5 assumptions the model depends on — price assumptions, volume assumptions, cost assumptions, customer behaviour assumptions
For each assumption, run a stress test: what happens to EBITDA if this assumption is 20% worse than expected? Which assumptions, if wrong, make the business unviable?
For each critical assumption, identify the earliest leading indicator that would tell you it is breaking — and assign someone to monitor it monthly
Identify one alternative revenue stream or cost structure that would remain viable if the most critical assumption breaks — document it as a contingency, not a plan
What you can do yourself vs what needs help
The mapping and sensitivity analysis in Steps 1–4 can be done internally. Step 5 — identifying a viable contingency — often benefits from an external perspective, because founders are too close to the current model to see alternatives clearly.