The five conditions a claim has to meet before it reaches a client-facing surface are a source, a period, a measurement method, a permission status and founder approval. The fourth one surprises people, because it is not about whether the claim is true.
A result can be entirely accurate, well measured, and still unusable, because the client whose business produced it has not agreed to it being described. Using it anyway is a disclosure decision taken on someone else's behalf to win work from a third party.
The anonymised version
The usual workaround is to strip the name. A regional manufacturer, a professional services firm in the south east. This is less protective than it appears. In most categories the combination of sector, size and region identifies the business to anyone in that market, which is exactly the audience being addressed.
It also weakens the claim to the point of uselessness. An unnamed result is a claim a sceptical buyer cannot check, and those are discounted to nothing. The firm has taken a real disclosure risk in exchange for a sentence the reader does not believe.
What follows for a young firm
Real engagements exist here. None has cleared its permission check, so none is named, including the ones that would flatter us most. That is why this site publishes method, position and standards instead, and why the notes carry no client and no figure.
Permission is also worth asking for properly rather than assuming. A client asked at the right moment, with the exact wording in front of them and a clear statement of where it will appear, says yes more often than one asked vaguely at the end of an engagement.