Which weakness is holding the rest back?
Eighteen questions across six areas. Free, no sign-up, and private to your browser.
Eighteen questions, about five minutes
Six areas, eighteen questions. Answer rather than generously.
1. Flow and handoffs
Three questions. Answer for how it works on an ordinary Tuesday, not for how it is meant to work.
Take your most common piece of recurring work. Do you know how long it takes from request to finished?
When that work is in progress, is it mostly being worked on or mostly waiting?
How many approvals does a routine item pass before it is done?
2. Information and reporting
Three questions. Answer for how it works on an ordinary Tuesday, not for how it is meant to work.
If your board or your bank asked for last month's operating numbers this afternoon, what happens?
When two systems disagree about the same figure, is there an agreed answer for which one wins?
How many people can produce the operating numbers without asking anyone?
3. Systems and data
Three questions. Answer for how it works on an ordinary Tuesday, not for how it is meant to work.
How many systems does one customer record pass through before the job is finished?
Is anything important still running through a spreadsheet that nobody owns?
When you add a system, does a named person own the connection to the others?
4. Dependency and key person risk
Three questions. Answer for how it works on an ordinary Tuesday, not for how it is meant to work.
If your most loaded operator took three weeks off with no notice, what happens?
How much of the week's work needs a decision from you or one other person?
Are your core processes written down well enough for a new hire to run them?
5. Commercial operations
Three questions. Answer for how it works on an ordinary Tuesday, not for how it is meant to work.
From an agreed deal to the first invoice going out, how long?
Do you know your close rate and what one inquiry is worth?
When a customer asks for status mid delivery, how fast can anyone answer?
6. Continuity and readiness
Three questions. Answer for how it works on an ordinary Tuesday, not for how it is meant to work.
If a buyer, an investor or an auditor asked for your operating documentation tomorrow, could you produce it?
Has anything important failed quietly in the last year and been found late?
If volume doubled in six months, do you know what breaks first?
Operating health
0 / 36
Nothing answered yet.
Flow and handoffs
Information and reporting
Systems and data
Dependency and key person risk
Commercial operations
Continuity and readiness
The read
Answer the eighteen
The written read back
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We reply within one business day.
This is the broadest of the set. If it points at one area and you want to go deeper on that area specifically, the tools page covers the other eleven, grouped by the question each one answers.
What this usually leads to
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Eighteen questions across six operating areas. It returns the one weakness holding the others in place and the order to fix things in. About five minutes, and the result is yours whether or not you ever speak to us.
What you get
A read, not a score
A number on its own is a vanity metric.
Written for a real operating company
The questions assume revenue, staff, systems that disagree with each other and a leadership team that already knows something is wrong.
Five minutes, then it is yours
Eighteen questions, three options each.
An outside read if you want one
Send it in and we reply within a business day.
Why most health checks are worth nothing
The usual version asks twenty questions, adds them up, and tells you that you scored 64 percent. That is a number with no decision attached to it. Nobody has ever changed how a company runs because of a percentage, and the reason is simple: a total hides the only thing that matters, which is which single weakness is holding the others in place.
Operating weaknesses are not independent. A company that cannot produce its numbers usually cannot produce them because one person owns all of them, which is a dependency problem wearing a reporting costume. A company whose work sits in queues usually has queues because four people have to approve things, which is the same dependency problem again. Fix the reporting and the queues come back. Fix the dependency and both improve without being touched.
Questions we get
How long does it take?
Five minutes. Answer from memory rather than going to check. If you want to check something first, that is already telling you where the problem is.
We already know our problem. Is it still useful?
Usually. Most teams name a symptom rather than the cause. This tells you which of the six is holding the other five in place, and what to fix first.
What size company is this for?
One to fifty million in revenue. With staff, and more than a couple of systems that disagree with each other. Below that the answers are usually obvious already.
Where do my answers go?
Nowhere, unless you press send. It runs in your browser. No account, no sign up, and nothing about your answers reaches a server.
More in the guides and every answer in one place.
Read next
Where the answer usually points, who runs the fix, and what it costs to leave alone.
Shaheer leads the work, with engineers, writers, filers and analysts behind him. C-suite operations for a San Francisco AI company, Six Sigma on the process side, Anthropic certified on the Model Context Protocol, ten years across eight industries. See what we have built