Thirteen questions about how your company actually runs.

What it covers

The thirteen questions, in full.

Published here rather than hidden behind the widget. They are useful on their own — and a company that works through them honestly with its own leadership team will find most of what we would find.

1. 01

   Brand

   Could a new employee apply your brand correctly without asking anyone?

   Without standards a brand drifts into several versions within about a year, and nobody can say which is correct. This shows up first on vehicles and signage, where it is most expensive to fix.

2. 02

   Website

   Can a visitor on a phone understand what you do and contact you within ten seconds?

   Most visitors arrive on a phone, frequently on a poor connection. A site that has not been checked under those conditions is usually losing visitors before they read anything.

3. 03

   Search

   Do you appear when someone searches for your service plus your city?

   Ranking only for your own name means you are reachable by people who already know you and invisible to everyone else. For local businesses this is usually decided by the business profile and reviews rather than by the website.

4. 04

   Reviews

   When did your most recent review arrive?

   Recency matters more than total volume past a certain point. A wall of three-year-old reviews reads as a business that used to be good, and it weakens local ranking at the same time.

5. 05

   Software

   Can you produce a complete list of every system you pay for and what each costs?

   An incomplete inventory almost always hides three things: seats still billed for people who left, capability bought twice by two departments, and a module already included in a platform you own.

6. 06

   Integration

   Does anyone re-type the same information into a second system?

   When two systems do not talk, a person becomes the integration. That is a payroll cost, a source of errors, and a continuity risk — because it usually turns out only one person knows the whole chain.

7. 07

   Automation

   Is there recurring work someone does manually every week?

   High-frequency, low-judgment work done by hand is the clearest automation candidate there is. Simplify it first — automating a step you could have deleted makes it permanent.

8. 08

   Payments

   Does a payment update the job and the books without anyone re-entering it?

   Manual reconciliation costs hours every month and produces a figure that approximately resembles your accounting rather than agreeing with it. It also tends to hide uncollected balances.

9. 09

   Operations

   How many decisions still reach the owner that should not?

   Decisions escalate when someone has been given responsibility without the authority to act on it. It is structural rather than a performance problem, and it is the most common constraint on a company between 25 and 500 people.

10. 10

    People

    How long between an application arriving and someone contacting that person?

    Good candidates are usually lost to speed rather than to pay. An application that sits over a weekend is frequently already committed elsewhere by the time anyone calls.

11. 11

    Data

    If two reports disagree, is it obvious which one is right?

    Disagreeing reports almost always mean the same word means different things in two systems — "job", "lead" and "revenue" are the usual three. No reporting tool fixes a definition problem.

12. 12

    Customer experience

    How quickly does a new inquiry get a real response?

    Conversion falls off sharply within the first hour, and almost every business underestimates its own average. This is usually the cheapest available improvement to revenue.

13. 13

    Security & continuity

    If one key person left tomorrow, would anything stop working?

    Knowledge and access concentrated in one person is a continuity risk that is invisible until it is urgent. It typically includes system access, undocumented processes, and tools set up on a personal account.