A founder came to me after my first Elevate CEO cohort and said he was shutting down his business.

He'd been working on it for around 18 months, had paying customers, a small team in place, and a decent enough product.

But something felt off and he couldn't name it.

Then he sat through the Founder X-ray.

15 minutes answering 5 penetrating questions in front of a group other founders at his stage.

All his cards thrown on the table.

This founder realized in 15 minutes what he couldn't see in 18 months: The product wasn't truly scalable. Customers didn't really *need* it. There was no clear path to profitability.

He closed it down.

Now that might sound like failure. But what he got in return was time. And really, time is the most precious asset we all have.

If his time is better spent on another venture, that's a huge win.

Those 15 minutes of uncomfortable honesty saved him the next year grinding on the wrong thing and tens of thousands in costs (paying people to build, market it, keeping the lights on) for a product that just wasn't going to work.

You can grind for months telling yourself the story about why your pricing works that way, or why your product just needs one more feature, or why your customers just need more education about the category.

We all carry some cognitive bias.

We all believe our solution is the best one out there - or at least “could be” with more time, money, creativity, and effort invested.

You can't see certain patterns when you're stuck inside it.

But when you have to say it out loud in front of people at your exact stage who've seen this before?

The deflections don't work anymore.

I've seen it happen time and again.

A founder starts explaining their business model and halfway through, they hear themselves. The logic breaks down when it has to leave their head.

You can't fix what you won't acknowledge. And you can't acknowledge what you've never said out loud.

What The X-Ray Actually Does

It surfaces what you're avoiding.

Questions like "What keeps getting pushed to next month?" force you to name the thing you've been working around for 6 months.

It exposes your expensive habits.

We map which decisions still require your approval.

Most early-stage founders discover 50%+ shouldn't.

Approving every expense under $800. Reviewing every customer email. Attending every sales call "just in case."

These are often security blankets dressed up as leadership activities.

It also exposes you to feedback from angles you hadn't considered.

Maybe you're charging for features when you should be pricing for outcomes.

Maybe your best customer segment is the one you're ignoring.

Maybe the feature you're building solves a problem nobody actually has.

You just don't know until someone with pattern recognition asks you to defend it out loud.

The Room Won't Let You BS

Then we dig:

Which decisions always flow to you?

What breaks when you're not available?

Where are you the critical dependency holding everything back?

This is tactical diagnosis, and it's not comfortable.

But once everyone's been through it, the walls come down. The pretense is gone. And the real work can begin.

By dinner on Day 1, every founder knows their 2-3 core constraints. They've watched the pattern repeat across the whole group.

And from there, we build decision frameworks. We extract the IP from your head. We reconstruct your role.

In 15 minutes, we accomplish what 15 months of thinking alone cannot:

• Surface the core constraints strangling your growth
• Set the tactical agenda for your transformation
• Identify which $500k Founder habits need to die for the $5 million CEO to emerge

That's why the X-ray comes first.

So if you've hit $250K+ ARR but can't break past your current ceiling, the X-ray will expose exactly what's holding you back.

If you're ready to see what you can't see alone, the next Elevate CEO cohort is running March 9-12, at my Saltwater Resort in North Carolina. Details here.