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Research · Diagnose

Comparable company benchmark

Compares your financial shape against businesses genuinely like yours, using filed accounts. Slow, unglamorous, and one of the few benchmarks based on audited numbers.

The printable canvas and the handoff into Claude Code are part of a paid plan. See what a plan includes. It needs the Claude desktop app on this machine, and your team and the prompt library already installed in that project — we cannot see your disk, so open it there.

Stage
01 Diagnose
Works at
Corporate, Business
Maturity
Scaling → Large organisation
Time
A week

What it is

A comparison of your financial ratios against companies with genuinely similar business models, drawn from filed accounts. Among the more reliable benchmarks available, because the underlying numbers have been audited.

Comparable selection
Chosen on business model rather than sector. A distributor and a manufacturer in the same industry are not comparable on any ratio that matters.
Normalisation
Recutting accounts to consistent definitions. Cost classification varies between companies and will otherwise dominate the comparison.
Ratio set
Gross and operating margin, cost ratios, working capital days, revenue per employee, return on capital employed.
Position
Where you sit in the distribution, by quartile rather than against an average.
Trend
Three to five years. Direction is frequently more informative than level, and single-year positions mislead.
Interpretation
Whether deviations reflect a deliberate strategy or an unintended weakness. The analysis; everything above is data.
The mistake people makeIf your model is genuinely unusual there may be no true comparables, and forcing a peer set produces confident nonsense. Saying no comparables exist is a legitimate and useful finding.
What it’s forYou want to know whether your margins, costs and ratios are normal for businesses like yours.
What it’s not forYou have no genuine comparables — a business model nobody else runs cannot be benchmarked.

How you run it

  1. Select comparables by business modelSame sector, different model tells you nothing. Match on how the money is made — channel, asset intensity, customer type.
  2. Normalise the accountsCompanies classify costs differently. Recut everything to consistent definitions before comparing, or you will compare accounting policies.
  3. Compare ratios, not absolutesGross margin, operating margin, cost ratios, working capital days, revenue per employee, return on capital. Size differences make absolutes meaningless.
  4. Look at direction as well as levelThree years of trend beats a single year's position. A declining leader and an improving laggard can show the same ratio.
  5. Interpret outliers carefullyBeing different is not automatically worse. Ask whether the deviation is the strategy working before treating it as a gap to close.

The prompt

Two ways to run it

Run this tool in your own Claude

The short prompt starts your partner against the library on your disk. The long one carries everything with it and needs nothing installed.

🔒 Prompt locked

Everything above is free — what this tool is, what it is for, what it is not for, and how to run it as a workshop. Three tool prompts a month are free with an account; beyond three, and for the printable canvas, it is the paid part.

See plans — from £19 a month

Your playbook

It lands in the earliest stage this tool suits. Move it on the Playbook page.

You’ll need

  • Your own accounts, recut to standard definitions
  • A defensible set of comparable companies
  • Access to filed accounts or a data provider

You’ll end up with

  • Ratio comparison across the peer set
  • Where you are an outlier, with the reason
  • What the comparison implies about the model, not just performance

Runs well with

Business Model CanvasCapability maturity assessmentCompetitor profilingComplementary assets — who captures the value