Brand Demand Scan · PE Portfolio Engagement
BDS identifies how much of each portfolio company's paid search budget is buying traffic the brand already earns for free, and what correcting it is worth in EBITDA terms.
Request a diagnostic → Quantified in EBITDA and IRR terms. Structured across 90 days.The mechanism
When a potential customer searches for your portfolio company's product or category, one of two things happens: the brand appears organically and the click costs nothing, or it does not appear organically and paid search fills the gap at cost.
In most portfolio companies, a significant share of paid search spend exists not to reach new demand, but to intercept demand the brand is generating but failing to capture organically. Attribution records the conversion as a paid conversion. The budget justifies itself. The structural problem remains invisible because no one is measuring what organic should have captured.
BDS makes the structural failure visible before capital is committed to correcting it. The EBITDA improvement is a consequence of fixing the structure, not of cutting the budget.
Paid spend drops when organic structure works. BDS establishes whether it does.
Three findings delivered simultaneously. Expressed in commercial terms: demand capture rate, quantified pipeline leakage, and EBITDA impact of structural correction. Board-ready at scan three.
What BDS produces
All three findings are produced simultaneously from existing data. The diagnostic identifies where the structural failure is, how large it is, and which corrections carry the highest commercial impact.
The proportion of branded search demand the company successfully intercepts. High branded CTR against low branded impression volume indicates strong recall within a narrow existing audience, not category breadth. This finding establishes the baseline: who already knows the company, and how reliably they find it.
The volume and composition of demand that searched category-level queries, received impressions, and did not click. This demand evaluated the category and resolved without engaging. It is the largest and most commercially significant of the three findings in most portfolio company diagnostics. It is also the one no existing report measures.
Category-level demand where the company has ranking exposure but a CTR below the median for that query type. Addressable without additional spend. This is a structural inefficiency in existing search presence, not a gap that requires new investment to close.
Portfolio context
In a 100-day plan, the standard diagnostic question is whether the growth thesis is achievable given the company's current demand position. BDS answers that question from the demand side.
The demand capture rate functions as a leading indicator that precedes revenue movement. A company expanding its organic capture rate is reducing its cost of acquiring the same volume. A company with a declining capture rate against a growing category is increasing its structural dependence on paid spend, regardless of what reported ROAS suggests.
BDS provides the baseline before capital allocation decisions are made. It separates structural demand problems from execution problems. They are addressed differently, on different timelines, with different capital requirements.
Who this is for
PE operating partner conducting commercial assessment of a portfolio company's demand position during the value creation phase.
Portfolio company CEO or CFO requiring a baseline demand capture measurement before committing to a growth investment programme.
Operating partner who has identified a discrepancy between reported funnel performance and commercial output, and requires a structural explanation.
Investment team conducting pre-deal commercial due diligence where the growth thesis is predicated on category expansion.
Engagement structure
The portfolio engagement runs across 90 days: three Brand Demand Scans delivered at 30-day intervals. Each scan produces all three findings simultaneously, allowing movement to be tracked against the baseline established at scan one.
Request a diagnostic
No presentation, no sales process. The output is a commercial decision, not a marketing recommendation. Engagement enquiries are handled directly by Jukka-Pekka Spets, founder and CEO of RoI² Ltd.
Open an enquiry →All enquiries are responded to within one business day.