Where does your company stand today?

Maayan Kaplan

Sep 25

3 min read

Updated: Sep 25

Planning starts with the destination and treats the starting point as known. HorizonAxis, the Strategic Profile Snapshot, reads the starting point first.

Six dashed rings scattered around crossing axes, each joined by a dotted line to one solid teal point where the axes cross. — Six private readings of the present, and the one starting point a plan needs.

WHY IT MATTERS

A plan is a distance, and a distance needs two points.

Two routes to one destination. A dashed route starts from an assumed starting point. A solid teal route starts from the actual starting point, lower down. Same destination, different routes. Illustrative. — Illustrative. Same destination, two starting points. The route you plan depends on which one you measure from.

Your leadership team will spend planning season on the second point: the growth target, the new market, the three priorities for 2027. The first point, where the company stands today, often gets a slide of last quarter's numbers and a nod.

Get the starting point wrong and a correct destination still produces the wrong route. The priorities are sized against a business that no longer exists.

WHERE IT BREAKS

The present goes unread for three reasons, and none of them is carelessness.

Three reasons the present goes unread. It feels obvious: everyone runs part of it. It is political: today is someone's record. It has no owner: each function sees its piece. — Three reasons the starting point goes unexamined.

It feels obvious. Everyone in the room runs part of the business, so everyone assumes they know it.

It is political. Today's position is someone's record. Reading it closely can feel like an audit of the people in the room.

It has no owner. Each function reports its own numbers. Nobody is accountable for the whole picture.

The result is a plan built on several private versions of the present, which is where last week's post on six readings of the present left off.

SIX QUESTIONS TO ASK OF THE PRESENT

Each framework strategists already trust asks a different question of the same business. You can put all six to your leadership team at the next meeting, with or without a diagnostic.

SWOT

What does your leadership team already believe about the company, and do those beliefs agree?

PESTEL

What has changed outside the business since the last plan was written?

Porter's Five Forces

Where does power sit in your market today: with you, buyers, suppliers, new entrants or substitutes?

VRIO

Which of your advantages could a competitor not copy within a year?

Ansoff Matrix

Where is growth coming from today: existing customers, new markets or new products?

BCG-style growth matrix

Which parts of the business fund which, and is that still true?

The value is in asking all six at once, of the same business, before anyone proposes a priority. Asked one at a time, each question tends to confirm whatever the person asking already thought.

Six cards in two rows. SWOT: what does your leadership team already believe about the company, and do those beliefs agree. PESTEL: what has changed outside the business since the last plan. Porter's Five Forces: where does power sit in your market today. VRIO: which advantages could a competitor not copy within a year. Ansoff Matrix: where is growth coming from today. BCG-style growth matrix: which parts of the business fund which, and is that still true. — Six frameworks, six questions of the same present. These are the frameworks HorizonAxis cites. They are not the names of the six dimensions it scores.

BY THE NUMBERS

HOW IT WORKS

HorizonAxis is the Strategic Profile Snapshot, a current-state 2×2 built on those six frameworks.

You answer 24 questions about the business as it runs today. Horizon12's AI co-strategist reads the answers together and scores six dimensions. Each score arrives with its reasoning and the framework it came from, so you can see which answers produced it.

A score you can trace. Your 24 answers feed a named framework, which produces written reasoning, which produces a score. An arrow leads from the score to you, who decide what it means. Illustrative. — Illustrative. Horizon12's AI co-strategist does the scoring, and every step behind a score stays visible. You decide what it means.

The result places your company on the 2×2. That position is the starting point every later conversation measures from.

WHO DECIDES

Horizon12's AI co-strategist scores. You decide what the score means.

When a score looks wrong, the reasoning shows you why it landed there, and you can judge where it misread the business. A disagreement you can trace to specific answers is more useful than an agreement you cannot explain.

The read belongs to you and your leadership team. What you do with it is your call.

WHEN TO USE IT

Your team is heading into 2027 planning, while the starting point can still change the agenda.
You have stepped into a leadership seat and inherited a strategy you did not write.
A strategy stalled, and the room disagrees about where.
Before an offsite, you want each member of your leadership team to run it separately and bring the result into the room.

HorizonAxis is the first of two reads. HorizonNorth, the Strategic Direction Snapshot, asks the same 24 questions of where you intend to be and takes ~9 min. Run HorizonAxis first. HorizonNorth is read against it, never alone.