Company Model Framework

The framework for seeing a company as a connected system of performance.

The Org Chart Shows Who Reports to Whom. It Doesn't Show How the Company Actually Works.

Every founder has drawn one. The boxes and lines that show who reports to whom — a picture of the company as a structure of people and positions. It's useful for onboarding. For compliance. For showing an investor the team.

But the org chart cannot tell you why revenue stalled in Q3. It cannot tell you whether your acquisition model is sustainable or just expensive. It cannot tell you whether the decision your head of sales made last week was the right one given the direction you set six months ago.

The org chart is a picture of the company as a collection of roles. The Company Model is a picture of the company as a connected system of performance. Same company. Completely different view. And the view you use determines the decisions you can make.

The Company Model Framework was created by Coach Leighroy in 2018. Originally built to give founders an objective way to discuss the design decisions they were making about their companies. It has evolved into a proven risk management model and the core framework that Hillspeed Group was built from.

A Company Is a Game. The Company Model Gives It Structure.

Every company, whatever its product or market, is competing for something. A position in market. A share of attention. A championship in the category it chose to play in.

Sport has structure for that competition. Leagues. Seasons. Scoreboards. Rulebooks. You know where you are, what winning looks like, and what the rules of the game are.

Most companies don't. The founder knows they're competing — but for what, against what standard, and through which specific levers? These things are often implied, inherited, or just unclear.

The Company Model turns a company and its mission into a sport. It gives structure and rules to compete within. It makes the game visible — so the company can play it deliberately.

The Architecture: Three Pillars, Nine Levers

Every growth model — company, athlete, sport, community — is built on the same architecture. Three growth pillars. Nine leverage points. The language changes. The structure doesn't.

In the Company Model, the three pillars are:

Leadership is not the top of the hierarchy. It is the base. Market is the force that pushes the model toward its championship. Business is what makes Market land and Leadership scale. Remove any one of the three and the system fails.

Within each pillar sit three leverage points — nine total. These are not roles, departments, or functions. They are the places a coach or athlete pulls to create movement. The same lever changes meaning depending on which direction force runs.

Leadership levers: Strategy · Standards · Execution

Market levers: Engagement · Monetisation · Activation

Business levers: Systems · Structure · Rules

Each Market lever maps to a relationship stage. Engagement is the Prospect — the point of first contact. Monetisation is the Customer — where value is exchanged. Activation is the Advocate — where the model compounds through existing relationships.

Each Business lever is a class of company design. Systems are people, technology, or partnerships — anything with a direct cost that produces things. Structures are anything that systems build or organise: meetings, processes, products, roles. Rules are what can and can't be done — the value chain statements that govern how systems and structures behave.

The Biomarkers: Objective Reality at a Point in Time

The org chart tells you who is responsible. It doesn't tell you how the company is actually performing.

The Company Model has six biomarkers — measurable signals, one per lever on the Market and Business sides. They are the discipline of confronting reality before making decisions against it.

GM1, GM2, GM3 — the Growth Markers — are company-specific. Each founder defines what engagement, monetisation, and activation look like in their model. There is no universal template. The model is built from the company's actual market, not from a category average.

Game Metric (GAME) is the single most important interaction in the company's model — the underlying currency of value in market. It is the one number that captures whether the business is creating the thing the market actually pays for.

Together, the six biomarkers form the Scoreboard — a position analysis at a point in time. Where you actually are, not where you think you are.

The Decision Layer: Three Indicators

With the biomarkers mapped, the Company Model produces three decision indicators — signals about how the three pillars are relating to each other, not the pillars themselves.

The exclusion is the coaching move. Each indicator names which pillar is not the lever to pull. This is what makes the Company Model operative for decision-making rather than just descriptive. You're not analysing everything — you're isolating where force needs to travel.

The Field of Play and Path of Growth

Once the biomarkers are visible, the Company Model asks a harder question: competing at what level?

Three ascending levels define the Field of Play: Good, Great, Exceptional. The founder chooses the field. The biomarkers tell you whether you're actually playing there — not whether you intend to.

The Path of Growth is how the company moves through levels. It runs through four mountains — Foundation, Good, Great, Exceptional — with basecamps as the structural moves within each. The summit of each mountain is the Championship: proof that the company owns this level before moving to the next.

Strategic Memos tie Market Notes and Business Pages to a mountain — packaging a stage of sequencing so the model can be carried forward, not just described.

The Schema That Governs the Model

A Company Model PCM — Proprietary Context Model — is not just a framework. It is a live system that connects the company's market behaviour to the founder's leadership schema.

The schema is what makes the model operative. It is the decision engine that runs between who the founder is and how that leadership shows up inside the company's game. The model can be as well-designed as possible — but if the schema is running a different programme underneath, the model won't hold.

This is what separates the Company Model from every other operating model or strategic framework in the market. Most frameworks describe the company. The Company Model connects the company to the person competing inside it. The model and the founder are inseparable.

This connection is managed through Report North — the platform where a founder's Codebase is built, structured, and connected into the Company Model PCM.

What the Company Model Makes Possible

Once a Company Model is built and live, three things become possible that weren't before.

Objective conversation. Rather than the traditional dynamic of leaders saying one thing and others interpreting it in their own way — which is where inefficiency lives — the Company Model gives everyone a shared language for the same game. Disagreement becomes productive because it's a disagreement about a visible model, not about invisible assumptions.

Reverse engineering from an ideal state. Define the Company Model at its championship. Then reason backwards — constraint-based — to today. What must change in the business, and in what order, to get from here to there? The model makes that question answerable. The Sustainability vs Efficiency layer asks the harder version: can the current model last long enough to build the ideal one, or does the model itself need to change first?

Accountability to the game being played. The model represents the founder. If the model is underperforming, there's nowhere to hide — but the founder can make intellectually sound decisions accountable to full-stack alignment. The model doesn't judge. It reveals.

Client Results

Yash Chavan built his Company Model at Saral from $4K/month. In 37 weeks the business was at $84K. Emery Wager left with $1.5M ARR and VC secured. Bonnie added $700K in new ARR in 21 weeks.

In every case the Company Model did the same thing: made the game visible, named the levers that mattered, and gave the founder the structure to compete deliberately.

Frequently Asked Questions