Glossary
Financial Vitality
The Zoe health dimension that carries the most weight at most stages. Measures the financial foundation of the business through six metrics: Cash Runway, Burn Multiple, Net Revenue Retention, Gross Margin, Revenue Growth Rate, and Capital Efficiency Ratio. Sourced from the accounting and CRM systems the target connects read-only, and checked against what the deck claimed (Said vs True).
Why it matters
Financial Vitality is the foundation: a company cannot execute, build culture, or compete if it runs out of cash or burns capital at escape velocity. It carries the most weight at most stages, which reflects investor reality. Cash runway under 12 months is an emergency; burn multiples above 3.0 signal unit economics problems; NRR below 90 percent indicates structural churn. These six metrics tell you whether the financial machine can fuel strategy execution and whether the management team has disciplined capital allocation. Poor Financial Vitality dims every other dimension and constrains post-close leverage.
How Zoe reads it
Financial Vitality pulls six sub-metrics directly from accounting and CRM data: Cash Runway (months of cash at current burn), Burn Multiple (net burn divided by net new ARR), Net Revenue Retention (recurring revenue retention plus expansion), Gross Margin (revenue minus COGS), Revenue Growth Rate (YoY or MoM), and Capital Efficiency Ratio (revenue growth divided by burn). These feed the dimension that carries the most weight because they answer the binary question: will the company survive to execute its plan? Zoe reads these when you run the Zoe Diagnostic, checks them against what the deck claimed, and keeps reading them if the case stays open under Portfolio monitoring.