The confidence behind every step.
Where you stand, before you move.
A free five-minute diagnostic across the five dimensions of expansion readiness. A pentagon score, a band placement, and the route to your next step. Yours to keep.
WHY INDEX EXISTS
Most international expansion goes wrong before the market does. Not from the wrong country, but from a leadership team that overestimated how ready it was. The Index turns that question into evidence in five minutes.
The analytical framework behind the Index.
The Frontier Index combines Cavusgil’s Company Readiness to Export (CORE) framework, four dimensions of internal readiness, with the Uppsala internationalisation model’s external market knowledge as the fifth. Inside-out and outside-in, in a single diagnostic.
WHAT YOU WALK AWAY WITH
Four things,
in five minutes.
A real read across five dimensions, a band placement against the rest of the field, the per-dimension narrative, and a routed next step that you choose whether to take.
The score.
A pentagon radar across five dimensions of readiness, your five points plotted in gold. You see the shape of your readiness profile, not just a single number.
The band.
Where you sit across Foundations, Building, Threshold, and Frontier. The band names the stage you are in honestly, with no inflation and no false reassurance.
The narrative.
A plain-English read per dimension and a peer-positioning paragraph against the wider field. You see where you are stronger and weaker than your peers.
The route.
A locked next-step recommendation per band, with the reasoning written out. No pressure, no salesperson, no booking link. You decide whether the step is the right one.
THE FRAMEWORK
Five dimensions. Fifteen questions.
The five dimensions that decide whether a UK leadership team is genuinely ready to take a foreign market, not just willing to. Three questions on each. Four options per question. No essay boxes.
Strategic Clarity
Whether the leadership team is clear on why it wants to expand, broadly aligned on the timing, and reading a real inbound signal from foreign buyers rather than an internal hope.
Rationale · Senior alignment · Inbound signalOperational Capacity
Whether the supply chain, the product, and the operations team can actually serve a foreign market without breaking the home base they rely on today.
Track record · Product portability · Team headroomCommercial Readiness
Whether the value proposition, the route to market, and the sales team are shaped for foreign buyers, or whether the UK pitch is being used as-is.
Proposition fit · Route to market · Sales capabilityResourcing Position
Whether the budget, the named senior owner, and the time horizon are committed at board level, or still sitting in the ‘agreed in principle’ column.
Ring-fenced budget · Named owner · Time horizonMarket Intelligence
Whether the team has decision-grade evidence on the markets it is considering, a system for tracking what changes in them, and a research discipline when a new one comes onto the radar.
Market depth · Tracking system · Research disciplineHOW THE WORK RUNS
Three steps. Five minutes.
No call to book, no salesperson to wait for, no follow-up sequence you cannot unsubscribe from. The whole thing runs in your browser; the result is yours immediately.
Three questions per dimension, four options each, multiple-choice throughout. No free-text fields. The pace is set by you, and the average completion time is five minutes.
The pentagon radar lands immediately, with your band named (Foundations, Building, Threshold, or Frontier), your per-dimension narrative, and the peer-positioning paragraph against the wider field.
A locked next-step recommendation per band, with the reasoning written out. Take it now and share the email with the leadership team. Come back to it when the timing is right.
WHO INDEX IS FOR
When the question is
“are we ready?”
The Index is the right place to start when the leadership team is asking the readiness question seriously. The trigger usually looks like one of these.
The conversation has started, but the evidence has not.
International expansion is on the agenda, no one has stress-tested whether the business is ready to take it on, and the team wants a structured starting point.
The board has asked the question directly.
“Are we ready?” was raised in the last leadership meeting. A defensible answer is needed before the conversation goes any further.
A deeper piece of work is about to be commissioned.
Before committing to a paid market study or an entry decision, the team wants to ground the brief in an honest read of internal readiness.
A new leadership team is taking inventory.
A change in direction, a new MD, a fresh head of strategy. The first step is to know the stage the business is in, not the one it wishes it were.
The annual planning cycle is starting.
International expansion is being scoped as a possible move for the year ahead. A five-minute read on readiness sharpens the conversation before resources are committed.
WHAT DOES IT TAKE.
Five minutes.
One real read.
No call to book. No sales follow-up. The Index runs in your browser, returns your score immediately, and you choose what to do with it.
FOUNDATIONS · BUILDING
You should start with Frontier Brief.
If your score lands in Foundations or Building, the highest-leverage next step is usually a focused, single-market read before any broader question gets asked. Frontier Brief is a sixteen-parameter dossier on one foreign market, delivered in two weeks for £900. The fee credits in full against Frontier Reckoning if you decide later to widen the lens.
One market, read in full.
THRESHOLD · FRONTIER
You are ready for Frontier Reckoning.
If your score lands in Threshold or Frontier, the readiness is broadly in place and the question shifts to which market to take seriously. Frontier Reckoning is the multi-market scored shortlist, a ranked answer across the field, scored against your criteria, with each market tagged Investigate, Keep, or Exclude.
Where to bet, where to wait, where to walk away.
WHO INDEX IS FOR
Where the Index routes you next.
The Index is free and yours to keep, whether you take a next step with us or not. The routes below are honest about which deeper step the evidence usually points to.
NEWSLETTER
