A studio operator was raising against two locations in two countries. Each market had its own rent, its own labor rules, its own tax treatment, and its own membership pricing. An investor looking at both wanted to know which market carried the better return, and the honest answer depended on the two models agreeing about everything except the market.
Separate workbooks would not have produced that. When two models are built independently, a difference in the output can come from a difference in the market or from a difference in how the two analysts handled churn, and nobody can tell which.
The currency-neutral engine
Both models ran on one engine. The operating logic lives in a shared driver layer holding membership build, visit frequency, churn, class capacity, staffing ratios, and the monthly cash rollforward. Each market supplies its own inputs to that layer. Currency sits at the boundary as a stated conversion, so the engine computes in local units and reports in either.
The result is a controlled comparison. Moving churn or class fill changes both markets through the same arithmetic, and any remaining difference in the output traces to an input a reader can point at.
EXHIBIT 1 · ONE DRIVER LAYER, TWO MARKET INSTANCES
The re-underwriting
The founders arrived with a base case assembled from their own operating history and their expectations for the second market. Each assumption was re-underwritten against sourced comparables, and the assumptions that moved were the ones where a founder's experience in one market had been carried into a market with different economics.
A base case built from the best month of every driver is a set of best cases wearing one label, and the model has to say so before an investor does.
The package
- Two operating models of fourteen to fifteen tabs each, on one engine
- A visible assumption register, every judgment named and editable in one place
- Mechanical checks tying the member rollforward, the cash rollforward, and the capital requirement together every month
- Cases showing where each market clears its own funding requirement
The transferable point
When one business is modeled twice, the engine belongs to the business and the inputs belong to the market. Building two independent workbooks produces two answers and no way to reconcile them, which is the position most multi-market raises are in when the diligence questions start.