The Four Gates · The cross-gate flagship
The Timetable
Defence sales is not a funnel you drive, it is a timetable you catch. The Timetable is that map, built for your company: three government clocks plus the prime lane, fused with your gate sequence and your raise windows.
The one-page document that separates a fundable defence company from a hopeful one. This is the artifact the Series A deck is built on.
The four lanes
Clock 1 · Planning
24 to 48 months out
Where requirements are born: white papers, capability reviews, NATO planning targets, EDF work programmes. If your capability is not in a planning document, there is no budget line to catch later.
Clock 2 · Budget
12 to 24 months out
Where money is authorized: ministry draft, government approval, parliamentary vote. Public, predictable, and almost universally ignored by first-time founders. Miss the insertion window and the earliest money moves a full year later.
Clock 3 · Contracting
0 to 12 months out
Where money becomes revenue: tenders, framework call-offs, urgent requirements, innovation contracts. The only clock most startups watch, and by tender publication the requirement was shaped and funded long ago.
Lane 4 · The prime lane
the prime's calendar
Design freezes, mid-life upgrade windows, obsolescence cycles and the prime's own capture bids. Budget-cycle arbitrage: if your subsystem is designed in, you reach production revenue on the prime's timetable, not the ministry's.
What the artifact looks like
What you get
- Your one-page, dated, four-lane timetable for the beachhead path you choose
- Five insertion points over the next 36 months, with dates
- Your next raise positioned within 90 days after a scheduled proof-point
- A named Plan B vehicle for when the primary window slips
- Monthly refresh as calendars move, assembled from the living datasets
Launch-scope honesty: the first editions are analyst-assembled from the living datasets, refreshed monthly, while the software matures. You are buying the artifact and the discipline, not a dashboard.
Start free: the framework paper
The all-gates snapshot is the methodology itself: the framework paper (v2.2) with the four gates, the 18 steps and the dataset stack. Email-gated, like every snapshot.
The method behind it is public
The Timetable is Step 11 of the methodology, executed for your company. The full chapter, the three clocks, the prime lane, the fusion rule, is the free sample chapter of the book.