The market: what is addressable, and on what basis

The deck uses $65B twice: once as the "growth consulting category" being displaced, and once as a new enterprise software category sitting alongside Sales, Marketing, HR and IT Operations. Those are different things and one number cannot be both.

Sized independently:

As a statement about consulting, $65B is close to the strategy consulting figure and is defensible if it is labeled as strategy consulting, which is a category that exists, rather than growth consulting, which is not a category anyone sizes.

As a statement about a software category, $65B is 18.2 times the higher of the two published readings of the nearest existing software market. The claim is not that innovation management software is $65B today. The claim is that a new software category will be created at the scale of the consulting market it displaces. That may happen and it is the whole thesis, but it is an assumption and it belongs on the page as one.

The $18.75B figure is $750K per business unit times 25,000 business units.

The unit count holds up better than the price. The Global 5000 is a real commercial database of the 5,000 largest companies worldwide by revenue, public and private, every constituent above about $1.1B in annual revenue. So "Global 5000" has a referent, and a company above $1.1B of revenue is a plausible buyer of a $250K strategy license. What does not hold is the price: $750K is three times the $250K list price on the pricing slide, with no stated basis for the difference, and five buying units per company is unevidenced.

Built from that universe, with each input given a range rather than a point:

The share of companies with a funded growth-initiative buyer is the input that moves the answer most, and it is an estimate. It is banded because the universe reaches down to about $1.1B of revenue, where a discrete corporate innovation buyer is much less common than at the top of the list, and because the database's largest single industry group is financial services with 844 companies. The deck's $18.75B is 16.7 times the middle build and 7.7 times even the high one.

$1.1B is not a disappointing number. What it costs to capture is the part that has to travel with it: a tenth of the middle build is 450 business units, which on the capacity arithmetic later in this memo is about 170 advisors and $44.2M of advisor payroll, against a conversion motion this memo shows is unproven and a $250K price no input evidences as signed. The size is attractive; the attainability is the constraint, and the two belong in the same sentence.

The reason to fix the published figure is not modesty. An investor who does the arithmetic in the room, which takes about ninety seconds, stops trusting the rest of the page, and the rest of the page is where the good evidence is.

Two further deductions matter for anything the company plans against.

Some of the strategy consulting pool is not contestable by a company of this size and never will be: board-mandated work where the buyer needs a firm whose name provides cover, regulatory and transaction work with liability attached, and relationships decades old. Innovera's evidenced engagements are all in the discretionary, exploratory part of the pool, which is where a new entrant can win on speed and price and where the buyer is not seeking cover.

And the buyer of a $250K annual license is not the buyer of a $25K pilot. The pilot can be bought on a departmental budget; the annual license usually needs a budget line that does not exist yet, which is the practical cost of selling into a category with no incumbent.