Pattern recognition is the whole job. It's also the easiest thing to fake.

By Andy Sloan

27 August 2026 · 2 min read

Pattern recognition is the whole job in strategic advisory. It's also easy to claim and hard to verify.

Anyone who's sat in on a few deals or a few boardrooms starts to see patterns. A growth problem looks familiar. A valuation gap looks like ones you've seen before. The instinct feels earned, because it's been right often enough to trust.

The problem is that most patterns are only tested against one kind of business. A growth problem at a nine-site dental practice group looks nothing like a growth problem at a software business with 5,000 customers, even when the diagnosis on the slide reads the same. "Scale faster" is not an insight. It's what gets said when a pattern hasn't been checked against anything that might disprove it.

Real pattern recognition requires disconfirming evidence. You need to have seen the same-looking problem turn out to be two different things, in two different kinds of business, to know which signals actually predict the outcome and which are noise.

I've had the benefit, over fifteen years, of being wrong inside more than one kind of business. Sell side, leading the UK brokerage business at Henry Schein, within a financial services remit spanning eleven European countries. Buy side, holding the pen on 120+ acquisitions at Portman Dental Care. Inside the software infrastructure dental groups run on, scaling Agilio's dental division past 5,000 practices. On the deal team for two private equity transactions.

Right now, at the same time, I'm advising a dental group, a dental software business, and a dental products manufacturer. Three live vantage points on one industry, running in parallel.

Here's what that teaches you. The question worth asking, of anyone advising you on strategy, including me, is which patterns they're drawing on and whether those patterns actually transfer. Operators think investability is a growth number. It isn't, on its own. Software businesses think it's retention. Also not enough by itself. Manufacturers think in volume and distribution economics. Different lens again.

Investability is whether the business survives someone else looking closely, from all three angles at once. Most businesses haven't been tested that way, because most advisers haven't sat in more than one seat.

If someone's advice sounds the same regardless of which business they're standing in, that's worth noticing. Not as an accusation. As a question worth asking before you take the advice.

Next read: The three prices of a dental business →