The 26-Point Business Performance Framework
A complete taxonomy of business performance: 4 general categories, 26 major categories and 278 sub-categories. Every sub-category carries three researched benchmark scores — time released, financial upside and automation potential — plus a definition, why it matters, the signal that a business has a problem there, and what can realistically be automated.
Major category 1 of the 26-Point Business Performance framework, in the Direction general category.
Why the business exists beyond making money — the problem it is in business to solve and for whom.
Researched cross-business benchmark for this area — typical opportunity, not any particular business’s score.
Purpose is what makes hard trade-offs decidable. Without it, every choice is argued from scratch and the business drifts toward whatever is easiest to sell this quarter.
Two people in the business give materially different answers to "why do we do this?", or the answer is only ever financial.
Very little of this can be automated, and pretending otherwise wastes money. What a machine can do is keep the stated purpose visible where decisions happen — pinned in the CRM, the proposal template, the weekly agenda — and flag work that has drifted from it. Write it yourself.
What the business does, for whom, and how — the operating statement of the present, not the aspiration.
A vague mission produces a vague offer. Staff who cannot state the mission cannot qualify a lead, price a job, or say no to the wrong work.
Your website, your proposals and your staff describe the business differently.
Use a language model to audit consistency: feed it your site copy, proposals, job ads and sales emails, and ask where the described business differs. That is a real weekly job it does well. Authoring the mission is not.
Where the business intends to be in three to five years, concretely enough to be wrong.
Vision sets the size of the machine you build. Businesses that skip it over-build for growth that never comes, or under-build and hit a wall they saw coming for two years.
Capacity, hiring and systems decisions are made one at a time with no shared destination behind them.
Automate the tracking, not the vision: a single dashboard that shows the two or three numbers the vision implies (customers, revenue per head, geographic reach) against where they need to be. Review quarterly.
The three-to-five-year objectives that make the vision measurable — the outcomes, not the activities.
Objectives are what turn a vision into something you can be accountable for. Without them "growth" is a mood rather than a plan, and nobody can tell whether this year worked.
You cannot name, without looking, the three numbers that would tell you this year succeeded.
Hold objectives in one system (a shared doc, an OKR tool, or a dashboard) and wire the actuals in automatically from finance and CRM so progress is never a manual slide-building exercise. Set the objectives by hand; report on them automatically.
What the business is actually working on right now, in ranked order, and what it has consciously deferred.
This is where most owner time leaks. An unranked list is not a plan — everything is urgent, work in progress balloons, and nothing finishes. Ranked priorities are the cheapest performance improvement available to a small business.
More than five things are "top priority", or work started three months ago is still open.
Put every active initiative on one board with a hard limit on how many can be in progress at once, and automate the ageing report — anything untouched for two weeks gets surfaced. The ranking is a judgement call the owner must make; the discipline of noticing drift is not.
Whether the owners and senior people genuinely agree on direction, risk appetite, and what the business is for.
Misalignment at the top is expensive and quiet. It shows up as contradictory instructions, stalled decisions and staff learning to ask the leader most likely to say yes.
Decisions get reopened after they were made, or staff route requests to a particular leader to get the answer they want.
Almost none of this is automatable — it is a conversation, held properly and repeatedly. The only useful mechanism is a written decision record so that what was agreed is unambiguous later, which removes the most common cause of apparent misalignment: nobody wrote it down.
How direction reaches the people who have to act on it — cadence, format, and whether it lands.
Direction that exists only in the owner's head is not direction. The cost is invisible: people make locally sensible decisions that pull in different ways.
Ask three staff what the business is trying to achieve this year and get three different answers.
This one is genuinely automatable. A scheduled internal update, generated from the objectives dashboard and the priority board, sent on a fixed cadence, removes the failure mode where communication only happens when the owner has spare time — which is never.
Major category 2 of the 26-Point Business Performance framework, in the Direction general category.
How the business creates value, delivers it, and captures money for it — the shape of the engine.
The single highest financial-leverage line in the framework. A weak business model cannot be rescued by good execution; two businesses doing identical work can differ tenfold in profit purely on model.
Revenue only grows when headcount grows, or margin falls as volume rises.
Model design is human work. What software should do is show you the model working or failing: revenue by type, margin by delivery method, cost to serve per customer. Most owners are guessing at these because the data lives in three systems that do not talk.
The specific outcomes strategy is meant to produce this period, each with an owner and a measure.
Strategy without objectives is a document nobody reads. Objectives are what make it possible to stop doing something because it is not working.
Your strategy document has not changed a decision in six months.
Automate the reporting loop only. Pull actuals into the objective record on a schedule so the strategy review starts from facts rather than from someone spending a day assembling them.
Where you sit relative to competitors in the eyes of a buyer — cheaper, faster, safer, more specialist, or indistinguishable.
Positioning determines what you can charge. Businesses that cannot articulate their position compete on price by default, which is the most expensive strategic accident available.
Prospects routinely ask you to match a competitor quote, and you do.
Automate the evidence gathering: scheduled capture of competitor pricing pages, positioning language and review themes, summarised for a human. The judgement about where to stand is yours; the monthly research grind is not.
Which markets, segments, geographies and channels you have chosen to play in — and which you have not.
Spreading across too many segments is the most common cause of thin margins in small business. Each segment carries its own marketing, delivery pattern and support cost.
Your customer list contains several segments you would struggle to describe as one audience.
Segment your existing revenue and margin automatically from accounting and CRM data. Very few owners have ever seen profit by segment; when they do, the "where to compete" decision usually makes itself.
The specific advantage that makes a buyer choose you when they have alternatives.
Tied with business model for the highest financial potential in the framework. "How to win" is the difference between a business that must chase demand and one demand comes to.
Your answer to "why you?" is a list of adjectives any competitor could also claim.
Not automatable in any meaningful sense. The nearest useful mechanism is systematically mining won and lost deal notes for the reasons buyers actually gave — which requires that those notes exist, which is a CRM discipline problem worth fixing first.
The small number of strategic bets the business is actually resourcing this year.
Resourcing everything means resourcing nothing. Explicit priorities are what let a small team beat a larger one on a narrow front.
Every department has its own priority list and none of them reference each other.
Keep one list, visible to everyone, with the resourcing attached. Automate the drift alert: anything consuming significant time that appears on no priority is worth a monthly conversation.
How money, people and owner attention are distributed across the business, versus where the return is.
Most businesses allocate by history and by whoever asks loudest. Reallocating existing resources is usually cheaper and faster than finding new ones.
You cannot say which activity consumed the most owner hours last month.
Automate the measurement: time and cost attribution by product, segment and project, pulled from timesheets, payroll and the ledger. The allocation decision stays human, but it should be made against real numbers rather than impressions.
The things you have explicitly decided not to do, and the discipline to keep not doing them.
Undeclared trade-offs get made anyway, badly, in the moment. A written "not doing" list saves more time than almost any process improvement.
You regularly take on work that does not fit, because saying no felt harder than saying yes.
Encode the trade-offs where the pressure hits: disqualification criteria in the lead form, minimum job value in the quoting tool, a hard stop in the proposal template. Automation here enforces a decision you already made — it cannot make the decision.
The sequence of work that turns strategy into delivery — who does what, when, and in what order.
Highest time-leverage line in this category. A roadmap prevents the most expensive failure in small business: three initiatives running at 30% each, none finishing.
Initiatives are described by who is working on them rather than by when they will be done.
Genuinely well served by tooling. A single project system with dependencies, automated status roll-up and stale-item alerts removes almost all the manual chasing. Do not buy something heavier than the business needs.
The scheduled moment where strategy meets reality and is confirmed, adjusted or abandoned.
Without a review cadence, strategy is set once and then quietly ignored. The review is what makes the rest of this category real.
The last time strategy was formally revisited was more than a year ago, or only after something went wrong.
Automate everything except the conversation: the calendar hold, the pre-read pack assembled from live data, the list of decisions made last time and whether they happened. Turning up to a strategy review with facts already gathered is most of the value.
Major category 3 of the 26-Point Business Performance framework, in the Direction general category.
How large the addressable market actually is for what you sell, where you sell it.
Sets the ceiling on everything else. Businesses regularly invest in growth machinery for a market that is already close to saturated for them, or under-invest in one with years of headroom.
You have never estimated how many potential buyers exist in your area or category.
Automate the data assembly — industry statistics, census and business-registry counts, platform search volumes — into a refreshed estimate rather than a one-off spreadsheet somebody built in 2023. The interpretation stays yours.
Whether your market is expanding, flat or contracting, and how fast.
A flat market punishes the same strategy that a growing one rewards. Direction of travel changes whether you should be investing in share or in margin.
Your plan assumes growth without any external evidence that the market is growing.
Set up a standing monitor: industry association data, official statistics releases, search-demand trends, and job-posting volume in your sector, summarised monthly. This is exactly the kind of tedious, repeatable scanning software should do.
What is changing in how your customers buy, what they expect, and what they will tolerate.
Trend blindness is slow and then sudden. The businesses hurt worst are usually the ones whose customers changed gradually while their offer did not.
Objections you never used to hear are becoming common, and nobody has written them down.
High automation value. Feed review sites, support tickets, lost-deal reasons and industry publications into a monthly synthesis. A language model reading twelve months of your own support inbox will tell you what is changing faster than any external report.
Who you actually compete against — including the ones the customer considers that you do not.
Most businesses track two or three named rivals and miss the substitutes and new entrants that are actually taking the deals.
You lose deals to companies you had not heard of.
Automate ongoing capture of competitor pricing, offers, hiring, and review sentiment, plus a standing question in your lost-deal process asking who won. The list should maintain itself; you should only be reading the summary.
Your realistic standing in that field — share, reputation, and where you win and lose.
A clear view of position prevents both overreach and timidity. It is also what tells you whether growth must come from share or from the market itself.
You cannot say what proportion of the deals you bid for you win, or against whom.
Track win rate by competitor and by segment automatically from the CRM. The number is usually available already and almost never looked at.
The other ways a customer could solve the problem — including doing nothing, or doing it in-house.
For most small businesses, the biggest competitor is inaction. Positioning against a rival when you are actually losing to "not yet" wastes the entire marketing budget.
Deals stall indefinitely rather than being lost to a named competitor.
Instrument the pipeline so "no decision" is recorded as its own outcome rather than being left open forever. Automated stalled-deal reporting reveals the substitute you are actually losing to.
The rules, licences, standards and obligations that govern how you can operate.
Regulation is asymmetric: compliance is a cost, non-compliance is occasionally fatal. Changes rarely arrive with a warning addressed to you personally.
Nobody in the business is responsible for knowing when the rules change.
Subscribe to and monitor the relevant regulator and industry feeds, with alerts routed to a named person. Automate the watch and the register of obligations; keep human judgement for interpretation, and take advice where the stakes justify it.
How exposed the business is to interest rates, input costs, exchange rates, local employment and general conditions.
Exposure you have not named is exposure you cannot hedge. Two businesses with identical revenue can have wildly different fragility to the same downturn.
A 20% drop in demand or a 20% rise in input costs has never been modelled.
Build the sensitivity model once, then feed it live cost and revenue data so the scenario refreshes itself. Automated early-warning thresholds on your key inputs are cheap and rarely implemented.
The specific openings and hazards visible right now that the business has not yet acted on.
This is where market awareness converts into money. Categories 3.1–3.8 are inputs; this is the output, and it decays if it is not reviewed on a cadence.
Opportunities are discussed and then lost because no one owns the list.
Maintain a standing opportunity-and-threat register fed by the monitors above, reviewed at a fixed cadence, with each item either resourced or explicitly dropped. Automate the gathering and the reminder; keep the decision human.
Major category 4 of the 26-Point Business Performance framework, in the Customers & Growth general category.
A precise description of the customer you are best at serving and most profitable serving.
Everything downstream — messaging, channel choice, pricing, staffing — is cheaper and more effective when aimed at a specific person. A broad profile makes every marketing dollar work harder for someone else.
Your ideal customer description would fit most of the businesses in your city.
Derive it rather than imagining it: cluster your existing customers by margin, retention and ease of service, and look at what the best ones share. That analysis is a scheduled job over data you already hold.
The distinct groups within your customer base that behave, buy and cost differently.
Averages hide the business. A blended margin of 30% often conceals one segment at 55% and another losing money.
Strong automation candidate. Tag every customer at the point of sale, then generate segment-level revenue, margin, retention and support-load reports automatically. Once it exists, it changes decisions monthly.
The problems customers are actually trying to solve, in their words rather than yours.
The gap between what you sell and what they are buying is where marketing spend disappears. Businesses consistently describe features while customers describe consequences.
Your marketing language and your customers' review language share few words.
Run your reviews, support tickets, sales-call notes and enquiry forms through a language model quarterly and extract recurring problem statements verbatim. This is one of the highest-value, lowest-effort automations in the framework.
How customers move from first awareness to purchase — where they look, who else is involved, how long it takes.
Buying behaviour dictates where you must be present and how patient your follow-up must be. Getting it wrong means spending on channels that come after the decision was already made.
You do not know how long your average customer takes from first contact to purchase.
Instrument it: source tracking on every enquiry, timestamps at each pipeline stage, and an automated report on time-to-close by channel and segment. Most of the data is already being created and thrown away.
The underlying reason someone buys now rather than later — the trigger and the motivation beneath the stated need.
Motivation is what makes an offer urgent. Two customers buying the same thing for different reasons need different conversations, and the one who buys for relief converts faster than the one who buys for improvement.
Your sales conversations sound identical regardless of who is on the other end.
Add a single "what made you look into this now?" field to enquiry forms and sales notes, then tally the answers automatically. It is a small change with a disproportionate effect on messaging.
The criteria a buyer uses to compare options, and their relative weight.
If you do not know what they are scoring you on, you cannot lead on it. Businesses routinely emphasise the criterion they are proudest of rather than the one that decides the sale.
You are frequently surprised by why you lost.
Make win/loss reason capture mandatory to close a deal in the CRM, and report on it monthly. The automation is enforcement and aggregation; the insight comes from asking the question at all.
A working system for collecting what customers think, at the moments they think it.
Feedback is the cheapest research available and the most commonly skipped. Without it, quality problems are discovered through churn, which is the most expensive possible detector.
You hear from unhappy customers only when they leave, or only when they are furious.
Near-fully automatable, and should be. Triggered surveys after delivery, review requests after positive signals, sentiment classification on inbound messages, and alerts on negative responses routed to a human within the hour.
What each customer and segment is actually worth after the cost of winning and serving them.
The most commonly missing number in small business. Without it, acquisition spending, discounting and service levels are all set blind, and the least profitable customers usually get the most attention.
You cannot rank your top twenty customers by profit — only by revenue.
Very high automation potential. Combine sales, delivery cost, support hours and payment behaviour into a per-customer contribution figure, refreshed monthly. The hard part is attributing cost, and it is worth doing approximately rather than not at all.
How customer expectations and requirements are shifting, and whether the offer is keeping pace.
Customer needs move faster than most businesses review them. The decline is gradual — slightly lower conversion, slightly more price pressure — until it is not.
Conversion is falling and no one can explain why.
Trend your own feedback and objection data over time rather than reading it as isolated snapshots. An automated quarterly comparison of this period's themes against last year's is where change becomes visible.
Major category 5 of the 26-Point Business Performance framework, in the Customers & Growth general category.
The specific problem your offer removes, stated as the customer would state it.
If the problem is not sharp, nothing downstream can be. Vague problem statements produce vague marketing, long sales cycles and price-based decisions.
Your homepage describes what you do before it describes what is wrong.
Low automation potential — this is writing and judgement. The useful machine assist is consistency checking across every surface (site, proposals, ads, email) so one agreed problem statement is actually the one being used everywhere.
The single most important outcome the customer gets — the benefit, not the feature list.
Buyers do not add up features; they respond to one clear improvement in their situation. A diffuse benefit statement is the most common reason good offers convert badly.
You need three sentences to explain what the customer gets.
Test rather than automate. Run structured message tests on ads and landing pages so the benefit that actually converts wins, instead of the one the business is most attached to.
What genuinely separates your offer from the alternatives a buyer is weighing.
Differentiation is what removes price as the deciding factor. Undifferentiated businesses are forced into discounting and then blame the market.
Your key claims — quality, service, experience — appear verbatim on competitors' sites.
Automate the check, not the answer: scheduled scraping of competitor claims to find which of yours are actually unique. A machine can prove you are undifferentiated; only people can fix it.
The plain answer to "why should I choose you?" that a buyer would accept.
This is the sentence that carries every deal. When it is missing, the sales process compensates with effort and discount, both expensive.
Different salespeople answer this question differently.
Not automatable as content. What helps is capturing the reason won on every closed deal and surfacing the pattern — the real answer is usually already being given by your best salesperson and nobody has written it down.
How your offer compares against the realistic alternatives, including doing nothing.
Buyers always compare. If you do not frame the comparison, the buyer or a competitor will, usually on price.
You have no comparison material and rely on the buyer to work it out.
Maintain a comparison matrix that updates from monitored competitor pricing and feature pages, so the sales team is never arguing from stale information.
Whether what the customer receives is worth what they pay, in their judgement rather than yours.
The highest financial-potential line in this category. Perceived value for price governs conversion, discounting pressure, churn and your ability to raise prices at all.
Price objections arrive early and often, and discounting closes them.
Instrument the evidence: discount frequency and depth by segment, objection type by deal, and outcomes achieved for customers. A monthly automated report on where you are conceding price is usually uncomfortable and immediately actionable.
The evidence that your claims are true — results, references, credentials, guarantees.
Proof is what converts interest into purchase for a cautious buyer. Most small businesses have the proof and have never collected it.
You have delivered good outcomes you cannot show a prospect.
Automate the collection: trigger a results-and-testimonial request at the point of delivery success, store it in one library, and surface the most relevant items into proposals automatically. The failure is almost always collection, not availability.
Whether the value proposition is expressed simply enough to be understood in seconds and repeated by others.
A proposition that cannot be repeated cannot spread. Clarity does more for referral and conversion than volume of content does.
Customers describe what you do inaccurately when recommending you.
Good automation fit. Readability and consistency checks across all customer-facing copy, plus A/B testing of the headline proposition, both run continuously and cheaply.
Major category 6 of the 26-Point Business Performance framework, in the Customers & Growth general category.
Whether the product or service does the job it promises, to the standard promised.
Performance is the floor everything else stands on. Marketing a product that underdelivers accelerates the damage rather than fixing it.
Complaints cluster around the core function rather than around edges.
Instrument outcomes rather than opinions where you can — completion times, success rates, rework counts, uptime. Automated performance data turns "customers seem happy" into something you can manage.
Whether it works every time, not just when conditions are good.
Reliability drives repeat purchase and referral more strongly than peak quality does. Customers forgive a limited offer; they do not forgive an unpredictable one.
Some jobs go perfectly and some go badly, and nobody can predict which in advance.
Automated monitoring and alerting on the failure modes that matter, plus a logged incident record so patterns become visible. Most reliability problems are known to staff and invisible to management because nothing records them.
Whether every customer gets the same standard regardless of who serves them or when.
Inconsistency is what stops a good business scaling. It is also the quality problem customers talk about most, because it feels like luck.
Customers ask for a specific staff member by name to be sure of the outcome.
Checklists and templated workflows enforced in the system of record, with steps that cannot be skipped. Automation here does not replace the person — it makes the good version of the job the default one.
Defined, written standards for what "done properly" means.
Without a standard, quality is an opinion and cannot be trained, delegated or measured. This is the precondition for the owner stepping out of delivery.
Quality is judged by the owner reviewing work personally.
Encode standards into the tools: required fields, sign-off gates, automated pre-delivery checks. Writing the standard is human work; enforcing it should never depend on human memory.
How often work has to be redone, corrected or apologised for, and what that costs.
The highest time-leverage line in this category and one of the highest in the framework. Rework is paid for twice and is almost always invisible in the accounts.
Nobody can tell you what percentage of jobs required rework last month.
Log every defect and rework event as a matter of course, categorise automatically, and report weekly by cause. Pareto applies brutally here — a handful of causes usually explain most of the cost, and they are fixable once named.
Whether customers actually get the result they hired you for, measured after the fact.
Delivering the deliverable is not the same as delivering the outcome. Outcome data is what justifies premium pricing and produces the proof that sells the next deal.
Automated post-delivery outcome check at a set interval, with the answers stored against the customer record. This feeds proof, retention and pricing simultaneously — one of the better returns on a small automation.
The defined service levels around the product: response times, delivery windows, communication commitments.
Most complaints are about service standards rather than product quality. They are also far cheaper to fix.
Response times vary by who is busy rather than by policy.
Strong fit. SLA timers, automatic acknowledgements, escalation when a threshold is breached, and reporting on adherence. This is well-trodden ground and does not require anything exotic.
The mechanism by which the offer gets better over time.
Quality decays without deliberate improvement. A business with no improvement loop is relying on competitors also standing still.
The offer is materially the same as it was three years ago and no one decided that.
Automate the input side — collect defect data, feedback themes and staff suggestions into one queue — and hold a standing review. The improvements themselves are human work; the backlog should maintain itself.
The planned sequence of changes and additions to what you sell.
A roadmap prevents both stagnation and the more common failure of adding offerings opportunistically until the business does too many things badly.
New services are added because a customer asked, not because they were chosen.
Keep the roadmap in one place with demand evidence attached to each item, drawn automatically from lost-deal reasons and feature requests. Decide by hand, but decide with the evidence in view.
Major category 7 of the 26-Point Business Performance framework, in the Customers & Growth general category.
Evidence that people actually want this, shown by behaviour rather than by opinion.
Ten out of ten for financial potential, because nothing else matters if this is absent. Businesses spend years optimising marketing for an offer the market never wanted.
Interest is high and purchase is low, and you have been explaining that away for a while.
Measure behaviour automatically: enquiry-to-purchase rate, repeat rate, and how much demand arrives without you paying for it. These three numbers, tracked over time, are a far better fit signal than any survey.
The proportion of interested people who become customers, at each stage.
Conversion is the cheapest growth lever available — improving it costs nothing in additional traffic and compounds across every future marketing dollar.
You know how many enquiries you get but not what proportion buy.
High automation value and usually straightforward. Stage-by-stage conversion reporting from the CRM, segmented by source, refreshed automatically. The drop-off point is almost always somewhere the business did not expect.
Whether customers will pay a price that makes the business work, without persuasion.
Willingness to pay is a demand signal, not a pricing detail. Persistent price resistance across an entire segment means the fit is wrong, not that the salespeople are.
Closing consistently requires a discount.
Track discount rate and price realisation by segment automatically. Where volume allows, run structured price tests. The data collection is automatable; the decision to hold price is a nerve problem.
Whether customers come back without being chased.
The most honest fit signal there is. Repeat purchase is also the cheapest revenue in the business — no acquisition cost, shorter sales cycle, higher margin.
Revenue is stable but the customer list turns over completely each year.
Automated cohort reporting: of customers who first bought in a given month, what proportion bought again within 3, 6 and 12 months. This is a scheduled query, and very few small businesses have ever run it.
The proportion of customers still with you over time, and the rate at which they leave.
Retention compounds. A ten-point retention improvement is usually worth more than a ten-point conversion improvement and costs less to achieve.
You measure new customers monthly but not lost ones.
Very high automation potential. Define what "lost" means for your model, then report retention and churn automatically by segment, with at-risk accounts flagged on inactivity thresholds.
How much customers actually use what they bought, where usage is meaningful.
Usage predicts renewal and referral before either happens. It is the earliest warning available that a customer is drifting.
Customers cancel and it comes as a surprise.
If your product or service generates usage data, pipe it into the customer record with automated low-usage alerts. This is one of the clearest wins in the framework where it applies at all.
Customers who actively bring you other customers, and whether that happens by design or by luck.
Referred customers convert faster, cost nothing to acquire, and retain better. Most businesses receive referrals passively and never ask.
You get referrals but cannot say how many or from whom.
Automate the ask — triggered at the point of demonstrated satisfaction, not at random — and track referral source on every new customer so you know who your advocates are.
Demand that arrives without paid acquisition — search, word of mouth, direct approach.
Organic demand is the strongest evidence of real fit and the foundation of durable margin. A business that stops the moment ad spend stops has a channel, not a market.
Turning off advertising for a fortnight would stop enquiries almost entirely.
Attribute every enquiry to a source automatically and report the paid/organic split monthly. The trend matters more than the level.
Deliberate testing that the market wants what you plan to offer, before you build it.
Validation is the cheapest thing you will ever do relative to the cost of being wrong at full scale.
New offerings launch fully built, and some of them never sell.
Automate the mechanics of testing — landing pages, ad tests, waitlists, pre-orders — so a validation test is a two-day exercise rather than a project. The willingness to kill a validated-as-unwanted idea is human.
Major category 8 of the 26-Point Business Performance framework, in the Customers & Growth general category.
The visual and verbal identity — name, mark, colours, typography, tone.
Identity is the cheapest signal of seriousness a small business can send, and the one most often left half-finished. It rarely wins a deal on its own but it routinely loses one.
Your documents, site and vehicles do not look like they belong to the same company.
Automate consistency, not creativity: templates, brand-locked document generation, and asset libraries that make the on-brand version the easiest one to use.
The place you deliberately occupy in the buyer's mind relative to alternatives.
Positioning is what lets a buyer categorise you quickly. Businesses without it get slotted into whatever category the buyer already has, usually the cheapest one.
Prospects consistently misunderstand what tier of provider you are.
Little direct automation. Monitor how you are described in reviews, referrals and inbound enquiries — a language model summarising that language monthly tells you the position you actually hold, which is often not the one you chose.
How many of your potential buyers know you exist.
Awareness sets the size of the pool everything else draws from. Low awareness makes even excellent conversion produce small numbers.
Enquiry volume is stable and low regardless of what you change downstream.
Track branded search volume, direct traffic, mentions and share of voice on a schedule. These are proxies rather than truth, but tracked consistently they show direction, and gathering them by hand never survives a busy month.
What people say about you when you are not there.
Reputation is a compounding asset and an asymmetric risk: built slowly, damaged quickly, and increasingly the first thing a buyer checks.
You do not know your current rating on the platforms your buyers use.
Automated monitoring across review sites, social platforms and search, with alerts on new negative items routed to a person the same day. Detection should be automatic; the response should not be.
The volume, recency and quality of public reviews.
For most local and consumer businesses this is the single highest-leverage trust asset, and it is almost entirely within your control. Recency matters as much as rating.
Very high automation potential and one of the best returns available: trigger a review request automatically at the right moment in the delivery cycle, follow up once, and route unhappy responses to a human before they become public.
Demonstrated expertise — publications, speaking, certifications, visible track record.
Authority shortens sales cycles and supports premium pricing, particularly for considered purchases. It is slow to build, which is precisely why it defends well.
Prospects ask you to prove basic competence late in the process.
Automate distribution rather than substance: scheduled publishing, repurposing one piece across channels, and keeping credentials current and visible. Writing something worth reading is still the job.
Visible evidence that others like the buyer have chosen you — logos, counts, case studies, testimonials.
Social proof does most of the persuasive work on a website. Its absence is read as inexperience even when the business is highly experienced.
You have hundreds of satisfied customers and three testimonials.
Automate collection and placement: capture at the satisfaction moment, store centrally, and insert relevant proof into proposals and pages automatically based on the buyer's segment.
Whether the brand experience is the same across every touchpoint and over time.
Inconsistency erodes trust quietly. A polished site followed by a scrappy invoice tells the buyer which one is real.
Your customer-facing documents were written by different people at different times and it shows.
Templating and generated documents from a single source of truth. This is a solved problem and one of the fastest consistency fixes available.
Whether buyers believe you will do what you say — the foundation under everything above.
Trust is what allows a buyer to commit without further evidence. It is expensive to build and cannot be recovered quickly, which is why it deserves protecting ahead of short-term gains.
Deals require unusual amounts of reassurance, guarantees or reference-checking.
Barely automatable, and attempts to fake it are actively harmful. What software can do is make promises verifiable — visible progress, honest status, proactive notification when something slips. Reliability under automation builds trust; automated warmth does not.
The active practice of responding to feedback, resolving public complaints and maintaining standing.
How a business responds to a bad review is read more carefully than the review itself. Unmanaged reputation compounds in the wrong direction.
High automation potential on the mechanics: monitoring, alerting, drafting a first response, and tracking that every item was closed out. Approve responses personally — a mishandled automated reply is worse than a slow human one.
Major category 9 of the 26-Point Business Performance framework, in the Customers & Growth general category.
The plan for how demand will be created — which audiences, which channels, what budget, what result.
Without a strategy, marketing becomes a series of purchases made in response to sales calls. The spend is not the problem; the absence of a hypothesis is.
You could not say what your marketing is supposed to achieve this quarter in one number.
The plan is human. The reporting against it should be automatic, so the question "is this working?" has an answer that does not require a day of spreadsheet work.
The specific audiences marketing is aimed at, defined tightly enough to target.
Broad targeting is expensive in paid channels and ineffective in organic ones. Narrow definition is what makes a small budget competitive.
Your ad targeting is set to something close to "everyone nearby".
Build audiences from your own customer data — lookalikes from best-customer lists, suppression lists for existing customers, segment-specific campaigns — and refresh them automatically as the customer base changes.
Which channels you use to reach those audiences, and why those rather than others.
Channel fit determines cost per customer more than creative does. Being present in three channels properly beats six channels badly.
You are active on channels because you always have been, not because they produce customers.
Automated cost-per-acquisition reporting by channel, including the organic ones. Channels should be kept or cut on evidence, and the evidence should assemble itself.
What you actually say — the words, claims and offers that do the persuading.
Message quality changes response rates by multiples, not percentages. It is the cheapest variable to change and the most frequently left alone.
Your messaging has not been tested or rewritten in over a year.
Use language models to generate variants and structured testing to pick winners — but only against a proposition a human decided. Automated volume on a weak message just buys more of the wrong result faster.
The material that attracts, educates and reassures buyers before they talk to you.
Ten out of ten for automation potential — the highest in the framework. Content is also the main mechanism by which a small business earns attention without paying for every impression.
Sales conversations repeatedly cover the same ground that a page could have covered.
Now largely automatable end to end: drafting from your own source material, repurposing one asset across formats and channels, scheduling, and performance reporting. Keep a human editor — unedited machine content is recognisable and it damages the authority it was meant to build.
Customers acquired without paying per click — search, referral, social, reputation.
Organic acquisition has a high setup cost and near-zero marginal cost, which inverts the economics of growth once it works.
All acquisition stops when the ad account is paused.
Automate the operational grind — technical SEO monitoring, publishing cadence, internal linking, listing consistency, rank tracking — so the compounding asset gets maintained even in busy months.
Paid channels, where they make economic sense.
Paid is the fastest way to buy demand and the fastest way to lose money. It rewards measurement discipline more than any other channel.
You know your ad spend but not your cost per customer.
Automated bid management, budget pacing, creative rotation and alerting when cost per acquisition breaches a threshold. Set the threshold from your real unit economics, not from a platform default.
Demand that comes through other businesses, introducers and formal partnerships.
Partnerships are usually the highest-margin acquisition channel available to a small business and the most neglected, because they are relationship work rather than campaign work.
You can name partners who send you work but have no arrangement with any of them.
Modest automation potential. Track partner-sourced revenue automatically and automate the routine touchpoints — reporting back to the partner, referral acknowledgement, commission calculation. The relationship itself is not delegable to software.
The system that turns attention into identified, contactable prospects.
Ten out of ten financially, and near the top for time. Lead generation is the join between marketing and sales, and it is where most small businesses lose the value of their marketing spend.
Traffic is respectable and enquiries are not.
Very high automation fit: capture forms feeding directly into the CRM, instant acknowledgement, automatic source tagging, lead scoring, and routing to the right person without manual re-keying. Every manual step here loses leads.
Knowing which marketing produced which customers and at what cost.
The highest automation potential in this category. Without measurement, marketing budget is allocated by anecdote, and the loudest channel wins rather than the best one.
Your attribution is "I think most people find us on Google".
Automate end-to-end tracking from first touch to closed revenue: consistent campaign tagging, source capture at enquiry, and revenue written back against the source. Imperfect attribution consistently applied beats perfect attribution never assembled.
What it costs to acquire a customer and what that customer returns.
The number that makes marketing a decision rather than a gamble. It sets how much you can afford to spend, and therefore whether you can outbid competitors for the same customer.
You cannot state your cost to acquire a customer, or its ratio to customer lifetime value.
Combine ad spend, sales cost and closed revenue into an automated cost-per-acquisition and payback report by channel and segment. Once this exists, most marketing arguments in the business end.
Major category 10 of the 26-Point Business Performance framework, in the Customers & Growth general category.
What happens to an enquiry between arriving and being spoken to.
Nine out of ten for time and ten for automation. Speed of first response is one of the most reliably decisive factors in whether a lead converts, and it is almost entirely a systems problem.
Enquiries received in the evening are answered the following afternoon.
Fully automatable and should be: instant acknowledgement, immediate routing to a person, self-service booking, and an alert if nothing has happened within a set window. This is usually the single highest-return automation in a small business.
Deciding early which enquiries are worth pursuing and which are not.
Unqualified pipeline consumes the most expensive resource in the business. Qualification protects both the sales time and the delivery capacity behind it.
Your team spends significant time on deals that were never going to close.
Automate the gathering: qualifying questions in the enquiry form, enrichment from public data, and scoring against your ideal-customer criteria. The disqualification decision should be a human confirming an obvious answer, not discovering it in week three.
The defined stages every deal passes through, and what must be true to advance.
Ten out of ten financially. A defined process is what makes sales performance improvable, teachable and transferable off the owner.
Two salespeople describe the process differently, or the only process is "call them back".
Encode the stages in the CRM with required fields and exit criteria, and automate the prompts at each step. The process design is human; the enforcement should not depend on memory.
The contact that happens after the first conversation and before the decision.
The highest time-leverage line in the entire framework, at ten out of ten. Most lost deals are not lost to competitors — they are lost to silence after contact two.
You have quotes outstanding that nobody has chased.
Automate ruthlessly: sequenced follow-up with real content, task creation for personal contact, and escalation when a deal goes quiet. Keep the messages specific to the deal — a generic drip sequence on a considered purchase reads as indifference.
Knowing every open opportunity, its value, stage and next action.
Pipeline is the only forward-looking view of revenue a business has. Without it, capacity, cash and hiring are all planned in the rear-view mirror.
Your pipeline lives in someone's head or in a spreadsheet only they update.
High automation potential. One CRM as the single record, automated stage ageing, next-action prompts, and a weekly pipeline report generated rather than assembled.
Producing, pricing and issuing quotes and proposals, and how long that takes.
Nine for time, ten for automation — one of the largest recoverable time sinks in small business. Quote turnaround also correlates strongly with win rate.
A proposal takes hours to produce and is largely copied from the last one.
Almost fully automatable: templated documents populated from CRM data, priced from a rules-based catalogue, e-signature, and automatic follow-up. Reserve human effort for the parts that are genuinely bespoke.
The proportion of qualified opportunities that become customers.
Ten out of ten financially. Conversion improvement is free growth — it uses the leads you already paid for.
You do not know your win rate, or you know it only in aggregate.
Automated conversion reporting by stage, source, salesperson and segment. The value is in the breakdown: aggregate win rate hides the specific place the process is failing.
How long a deal takes from first contact to signature.
Cycle length drives cash flow and forecast accuracy, and it compounds: halving the cycle roughly doubles what the same team can process.
You cannot say what a normal sales cycle looks like, so you cannot tell when one has stalled.
Timestamp every stage automatically and report cycle length by segment, with stalled-deal alerts. Removing waiting time — for a quote, a callback, a document — is usually where the cycle shortens.
One reliable record of every customer and prospect interaction.
Nine for time, ten for automation. The CRM is the substrate everything else in this category runs on; without it, sales knowledge lives in individuals and leaves when they do.
Customer history is reconstructed from email inboxes.
Automate capture rather than relying on discipline: email and calendar sync, call logging, form submissions writing directly to the record. A CRM that requires manual data entry will be incomplete within a month.
Predicting what will close and when, with enough accuracy to plan against.
Forecasts drive hiring, purchasing and cash decisions. A bad forecast is worse than none, because it is acted upon.
Forecasting is a number the owner feels is about right.
High automation potential: weighted pipeline value, historical conversion rates by stage, and variance reporting against previous forecasts so the forecast itself improves. Keep a human adjustment step — models miss the deal you know is dead.
How sales activity and outcomes are measured at individual and team level.
Measuring only outcomes tells you the result too late. Measuring activity alongside it tells you why, in time to change something.
Sales performance is reviewed only when the monthly number disappoints.
Automated dashboards covering activity, pipeline created, conversion and revenue per person. Set the targets by judgement; let the reporting run itself.
Major category 11 of the 26-Point Business Performance framework, in the Customers & Growth general category.
How prices are set — by cost, by competitor, or by the value delivered.
Ten out of ten financially. Price is the fastest lever on profit in any business: a few points of price flow almost entirely to the bottom line, where a few points of volume do not.
Your prices were set by looking at a competitor, and have moved only with inflation since.
The strategy is a judgement call. Automate what informs it: cost per unit delivered, margin by job, competitor price monitoring, and win rate at each price point. Most owners under-price because they have never seen these together.
Knowing what it truly costs to deliver — including labour, rework, admin and the owner's own time.
You cannot price what you cannot cost. Underpriced work usually comes from undercounted cost, not from generosity.
Your cost per job excludes the owner's hours.
High automation potential. Time capture, materials, subcontract and overhead allocation flowing automatically into a per-job cost. Approximate and automatic beats precise and annual.
What is left after the direct cost of delivering — in total and per line of business.
Gross margin is the engine's efficiency. It determines how much you can spend to acquire a customer, and therefore whether you can grow at all.
You track revenue monthly and margin yearly.
Automate monthly gross margin reporting by product, service and segment straight from the accounting system, with an alert when it moves outside a normal band.
Which specific offerings make money and which quietly do not.
Almost every multi-service business has at least one offering that loses money and is retained out of habit. Finding it is usually worth more than a marketing campaign.
You have never ranked your offerings by profit contribution.
Very high automation potential. Tag revenue and cost by offering at source, then produce contribution reporting automatically. The analysis is trivial once the tagging exists — the tagging is the work.
When and how much you discount, and what it costs across the year.
Ten out of ten financially. Discounting is invisible cost: rarely tracked, individually small, and collectively often larger than the annual profit.
Discounts are given at the salesperson's discretion and never totalled.
Enforce approval thresholds in the quoting system and report total discount given by person, segment and month. Simply making the number visible usually reduces it.
How offerings are combined and presented as choices.
Packaging changes what customers buy without changing what you deliver. A good-better-best structure reliably lifts average order value and reduces price-only comparison.
You present a single price and the customer's only options are yes and no.
Automate the mechanics — configurable quoting, package-level pricing rules — and measure take-up per package so the structure can be tuned. The package design itself is a commercial decision.
How the business earns: one-off sales, retainers, subscriptions, usage, licensing, or a mix.
Ten out of ten financially, because the revenue model sets the ceiling on valuation, predictability and cash stability more than performance does.
Low automation potential — this is a design decision. Software supports it afterwards: subscription billing, usage metering, renewal management. Do not let billing-tool limitations decide your revenue model for you.
The proportion of revenue that repeats without being re-sold.
Recurring revenue reduces the sales burden, smooths cash flow and multiplies enterprise value. Even a modest recurring layer changes how the business feels to run.
None of your revenue is contracted beyond the current job.
Report the recurring/transactional split automatically and track it as a headline metric. The conversion of one-off work into ongoing arrangements is a commercial redesign, not an automation.
What a customer is worth over the whole relationship, against what they cost to win and serve.
The number that governs how aggressively you can grow. It is also the correct denominator for almost every marketing decision.
Acquisition spend is judged against first-purchase value only.
Very high automation potential: lifetime value by segment and cohort, computed from transaction history and refreshed monthly, alongside acquisition cost from the marketing data.
The terms you trade on — payment schedules, scope boundaries, variations, cancellation, liability.
Terms decide who carries risk and when you get paid. Weak terms turn profitable work into a cash-flow problem and a dispute.
Scope changes are absorbed rather than charged.
Standardise terms in generated contracts, automate variation and change-order workflow, and track scope creep by job. Automation cannot draft your commercial position, but it can stop it being quietly given away.
Major category 12 of the 26-Point Business Performance framework, in the Customers & Growth general category.
The first moment someone encounters the business — site, listing, call, shopfront, referral.
First contact sets the expectation everything else is measured against, and it is usually the least-supervised part of the business.
You have never been through your own enquiry process as a customer would.
Automate the consistency: instant response, clear next step, and the same information wherever someone lands. Then have a person walk the journey quarterly — automation makes it repeatable, it does not make it good.
How easy it is to actually purchase once someone has decided.
Friction at the point of purchase destroys demand that has already been paid for. This is the most wasteful place in the business to lose someone.
Buying requires a phone call during business hours.
Online booking or ordering, saved details, clear pricing, immediate confirmation, and payment that works on a phone. High automation value and generally quick to implement.
What happens in the first days after someone buys.
Nine for time and ten for automation. Onboarding determines whether a customer succeeds, and early success predicts retention, referral and repeat purchase better than anything later.
New customers ask questions that every new customer asks.
Almost fully automatable: welcome sequence, expectation-setting, scheduling, document collection, and a checklist that both sides can see. Build it once and every future customer benefits.
Keeping the customer informed through delivery without being asked.
Nine for time, ten for automation. Most "where is my job?" contact is caused by the absence of proactive updates, and answering it consumes real capacity.
A meaningful share of your inbound calls are status enquiries.
Automated status notifications at defined milestones, plus a self-service view of progress. This is one of the clearest cases in the framework where automation reduces work and improves experience simultaneously.
The experience of receiving what was bought — timing, condition, handover, first use.
Delivery is where promises are tested. It is also where a good sales process most often gets undone.
Delivery quality depends on who happens to be doing it.
Standardised delivery checklists, automated scheduling and confirmation, and a triggered post-delivery check. The human parts of handover matter; the coordination around them should not be manual.
How much effort the customer has to expend to do business with you.
Ease is a stronger driver of loyalty than delight. Customers rarely leave because of one bad experience; they leave because everything is slightly harder than it needs to be.
Customers have to repeat information they have already given you.
Remove re-entry through integrated systems, pre-filled forms, saved preferences and one place to see everything. Every re-keyed field is a small tax you are charging your own customers.
How quickly the business responds when a customer reaches out.
Nine for time, ten for automation. Responsiveness is the most frequently cited difference between a business customers recommend and one they tolerate.
Response time varies from ten minutes to three days depending on workload.
Automated acknowledgement with a realistic timeframe, routing to the right person, escalation on breach, and reporting on actual response times. Acknowledgement is not an answer — do not let automation pretend it is.
Help available after purchase, and how good it is.
Support quality drives retention and review sentiment disproportionately. It is also the function that scales worst without deliberate design.
Support is whoever is free, working from memory.
High automation potential: a searchable knowledge base, triage and routing, suggested responses drafted from previous resolutions, and automatic follow-up on closure. Keep a fast human path — automated support with no exit to a person is a retention risk, not a saving.
What happens when something goes wrong and the customer says so.
A well-resolved complaint produces a more loyal customer than a problem-free experience. A badly handled one produces a public review that costs future customers.
Complaints are handled ad hoc and are not recorded anywhere.
Automate the process, not the empathy: logging, ownership, deadlines, escalation and root-cause categorisation, with reporting on recurring causes. The conversation should be human and fast.
Contact and value after the transaction is complete.
The after-sales window is when referrals, reviews and repeat purchases are cheapest to obtain, and it is the period most businesses go silent.
Your last contact with most customers was the invoice.
Strong automation fit: scheduled check-ins, maintenance or renewal reminders, review requests, and useful content tied to what they bought. Low effort, high and compounding return.
The total effort across the whole relationship, viewed as the customer experiences it.
Individual touchpoints can each be acceptable while the whole is exhausting. Effort measured end to end is what predicts churn.
Each department reports good scores and customers still leave.
Instrument the whole journey: capture effort or satisfaction at multiple points into one customer record, and report the journey rather than the touchpoint. Walk it yourself once a quarter as well.
Major category 13 of the 26-Point Business Performance framework, in the Customers & Growth general category.
The proportion of customers who stay, measured over a defined period.
Ten out of ten financially. Retention is the cheapest growth available: no acquisition cost, higher margin, shorter cycle, and it compounds against every future year.
You celebrate new customers and never count the ones who quietly stopped.
Define what "still a customer" means for your model, then automate cohort retention reporting. Very high automation potential, and most businesses could produce it from data they already hold.
The rate at which customers stop buying, and the reasons they give when they do.
Churn is retention's diagnostic half. Knowing the rate tells you the size of the leak; knowing the reasons tells you where it is.
You have no exit reason recorded for any lost customer.
Automate detection — inactivity thresholds, missed renewals, declining order frequency — with alerts before the customer is gone. Automate the exit-reason capture too; analyse the reasons personally.
How often existing customers come back, and how that interval compares to what it should be.
Repeat purchase converts a customer into an asset. In most small businesses, the second purchase is dramatically more profitable than the first.
Most of your revenue this year came from customers you did not have last year.
Automated repeat-purchase reporting plus triggered prompts at the natural reorder interval for each customer. Timing based on their history beats a fixed monthly campaign.
Deliberate ongoing contact with customers between purchases.
Relationships decay by default. The businesses with the strongest retention are usually not the ones with the best product — they are the ones that stayed in contact.
Contact with a customer only happens when one of you needs something.
High automation fit for the cadence and the reminders; low for the content. Automate who to contact and when, and have a person decide what to say to the accounts that matter.
Moving existing customers to a higher-value version of what they already buy.
Selling to an existing customer converts several times better than selling to a stranger, at a fraction of the cost.
Customers discover your higher tier from your website rather than from you.
Automate identification — usage thresholds, purchase patterns, account growth — and prompt the conversation. Automated upsell messaging works for simple products; considered purchases need a person.
Selling adjacent products or services to existing customers.
Most businesses find that customers do not know half of what they offer. That is a communication failure with a direct revenue cost.
Customers buy an adjacent service elsewhere and are surprised you provide it.
Automate the gap analysis: for each customer, what have they not bought that similar customers have? Then prompt the relevant conversation. This is a straightforward, high-return rule over existing data.
Bringing back customers who have stopped buying.
Eight for time, ten for automation. Lapsed customers already know and trust you — they are usually the cheapest source of new revenue in the business and the least worked.
You have a list of past customers you have not contacted in over a year.
One of the best automation returns available. Define lapsed, segment by past value, and run a periodic reactivation sequence with a genuine reason to return. Set it up once; it produces revenue every cycle.
Whether customers actively prefer you when alternatives are available.
Loyalty is what protects margin under competitive pressure. It is earned through reliability and relationship rather than bought with points.
Customers leave for a marginally cheaper competitor.
Moderate. Loyalty mechanics and recognition can be automated; the underlying reliability cannot. Be wary of loyalty programmes used to paper over a service problem — they cost money and do not work.
Customers actively recommending you, and a system that encourages it.
Advocacy produces the highest-quality demand at the lowest cost. It is the eventual output of everything else in this category working.
You get referrals and have never asked for one.
Automate the ask, triggered on a satisfaction signal rather than a calendar, and track referral source on every new customer so advocates can be recognised.
The total profit a customer relationship generates over its life.
Ten out of ten financially. Lifetime value is what makes retention, pricing and acquisition decisions comparable to each other.
Marketing decisions are justified against the first sale.
High automation potential: compute lifetime value by segment and cohort from transaction history, refresh it monthly, and put it next to acquisition cost. These two numbers together settle most growth arguments.
Major category 14 of the 26-Point Business Performance framework, in the Business Operations general category.
The main repeatable sequences of work that produce and deliver what you sell.
Core workflows are where most of the labour cost sits. A business that has never mapped them is optimising by instinct, and usually optimising the wrong step.
Nobody can draw the end-to-end path a job takes without arguing about it.
Map first, automate second — automating an undocumented process encodes its faults. Once mapped, workflow tooling can enforce sequence, assign work and remove the hand-off delays that dominate most cycle times.
A named person accountable for each process working, not just for doing their part of it.
Processes without owners degrade. Problems at the joins between roles are nobody's job to fix, and those joins are where most failures occur.
A recurring problem has been known for months and nobody is responsible for it.
Not automatable — this is an accountability decision. Software helps by making process performance visible per owner so the accountability has something behind it.
The step that limits total output, regardless of how fast everything else runs.
Ten for time and ten for financial impact — jointly the highest-rated line in the framework. Improving anything other than the bottleneck produces no additional throughput at all.
Work piles up consistently at the same point.
Instrument queue lengths and waiting times at every stage so the constraint is identified by data rather than by argument — it is frequently not where people assume. Then relieve it deliberately, by automation, capacity or resequencing.
Time when nothing is happening — waiting for approval, information, a person, or a hand-off.
Ten out of ten for time. In most small businesses, elapsed time is overwhelmingly waiting rather than working, and waiting costs nothing to remove except attention.
A two-hour job takes two weeks to complete.
Very high automation potential. Automatic hand-offs, parallel rather than sequential steps, approval rules that only escalate exceptions, and alerts on anything idle beyond a threshold.
The same information being entered, checked or handled more than once.
Ten for time and ten for automation. Duplication is pure waste, invisible in the accounts, and it is almost always caused by systems that do not talk to each other.
The same customer details are typed into more than one system.
The clearest automation case in the framework. Integrate systems so data is entered once; where integration is impractical, automate the transfer. Count the re-entry points before starting — there are usually more than expected.
Work that has to be corrected, and the cause behind it.
Ten for time. Rework is paid twice and damages the customer relationship as well as the margin, yet it rarely appears as a line anywhere.
Errors are fixed quietly by whoever notices, and never counted.
Automated validation and checks at the point of entry catch most of it before it propagates. Log every error with a cause code and report weekly — a small number of causes will explain the majority.
Doing the same work the same way regardless of who does it.
Standardisation is the precondition for delegation, automation and quality. Without it, capacity is capped by the individuals who know how.
Output quality varies noticeably by person.
Encode the standard into the tools — templates, required fields, guided workflows — so the standard way is also the easy way. Documentation alone rarely changes behaviour; the system doing it for you does.
Written procedures for the work that matters, kept current enough to be followed.
Nine out of ten for automation. Documentation is what turns owner knowledge into business knowledge, and it is the difference between a business that can be left and one that cannot.
Training someone new means them following an experienced person around.
Now much cheaper than it was: record the work being done and have a language model draft the procedure, then have the doer correct it. Keep procedures beside the work, not in a folder nobody opens.
How much the business can actually deliver, and how close it is to that limit.
Capacity blindness causes both over-promising and premature hiring. Knowing the real number is what makes growth decisions safe.
Whether you can take on more work is a feeling rather than a calculation.
Automate the measurement: committed work against available hours or units, forward-looking. Combine with pipeline data and the capacity conversation becomes a plan instead of a panic.
Output per person or per hour, and whether the trend is going the right way.
Nine for time and ten for financial. Productivity is where operational improvement becomes profit rather than just relief.
Headcount has grown faster than revenue.
Track revenue and delivered units per employee automatically over time. Use it as a trend for the business, not as a stick for individuals — measuring people rather than processes produces gaming, not productivity.
Checking work against the standard before it reaches the customer.
Catching a problem internally is dramatically cheaper than catching it after delivery, in both money and reputation.
Customers are your primary defect detector.
Automated checks and validation wherever the criteria are objective, with human review reserved for judgement. Track escape rate — defects found by customers versus found internally — as the measure of whether it is working.
A standing mechanism for getting better rather than an occasional project.
Compounding small improvements beat periodic overhauls, and they do not require the business to stop.
Improvement only happens after something breaks badly.
Automate the inputs: a suggestion and defect queue fed from the data above, reviewed on a fixed cadence with each item accepted or closed. The improvements are human work; the discipline should be systemic.
Major category 15 of the 26-Point Business Performance framework, in the Business Operations general category.
How you buy what you need — selection, approval, ordering and price.
Procurement is a direct margin lever that needs no customer involvement. Small businesses routinely pay list price out of habit on spend large enough to negotiate.
Nobody has reviewed supplier pricing in over a year.
High automation potential: approval workflows, reorder rules, purchase orders raised from demand, and spend analysis by supplier and category. Consolidated spend visibility is usually what unlocks the negotiation.
Whether suppliers deliver on time, in full, at the agreed quality and price.
Supplier failure becomes your failure in the customer's eyes. Unmeasured supplier performance means the cost lands on you invisibly.
You know which supplier is unreliable by reputation but not by number.
Automate scorecards from your own receiving data: on-time rate, in-full rate, defect rate, price variance. Review quarterly with the supplier — the conversation is far easier with data.
How much of your critical supply depends on one supplier with no alternative in place.
Concentration is fine until it is not. A sole supplier for a critical input is a business risk with no warning period.
One supplier accounts for a large share of your critical inputs and you have no alternative qualified.
Automate the visibility — spend concentration by supplier, flagged against a threshold. Qualifying an alternative is procurement work that cannot be automated, and it is worth doing before you need it.
What you hold, what it costs to hold it, and whether it is the right stock.
Ten out of ten financially where it applies. Inventory is cash sitting on a shelf, and inventory errors cause both lost sales and write-offs simultaneously.
You have stock that has not moved in a year alongside items you regularly run out of.
Very high automation potential: real-time stock levels, reorder points calculated from actual demand, ageing and dead-stock reporting, and demand forecasting. This is a well-solved problem and the payback is usually fast.
Moving goods or people to where the work happens.
Logistics cost is often accepted as fixed when it is highly optimisable. It also drives delivery reliability, which drives repeat purchase.
Routes and schedules are planned the same way they were five years ago.
Route optimisation, scheduling, tracking and automatic customer notification. Strong automation fit with measurable savings in both cost and inbound status enquiries.
Getting the order to the customer completely and correctly.
Nine for time, ten for automation. Fulfilment is high-volume repetitive work where small error rates create large customer-service costs.
Order errors are discovered by customers rather than before dispatch.
Near-fully automatable: order routing, pick and pack verification, labelling, dispatch notification and exception handling. Automate the happy path completely and route only exceptions to a person.
How long it takes from order to delivery, and how variable that is.
Nine for time. Lead time is a competitive weapon and a cash-flow lever — shorter lead times mean faster invoicing and less working capital tied up.
You quote lead times as a range because you cannot predict them.
Instrument each stage automatically and report the distribution rather than the average. Variability is usually the real problem, and it hides inside an average that looks fine.
Whether you deliver on the date you promised, and how often you do not.
Reliability drives trust more than speed does. Customers plan around your promise, and a missed date costs them more than a longer honest one.
Promised dates are optimistic and frequently revised.
Track promised versus actual on every job automatically and report the on-time rate. Automate the proactive warning when a job is going to be late — telling the customer first is most of the recovery.
Checking incoming and outgoing quality against a defined standard.
Defects caught at receipt cost a fraction of defects caught at the customer. This is the cheapest quality intervention available.
Supplier defects are found during the job rather than on arrival.
Automate the record-keeping, sampling schedule and trend reporting; keep the inspection itself wherever human judgement is needed. Feed the results into supplier scorecards so the cost lands where it belongs.
Alternative suppliers and routes identified and ready before they are needed.
Contingency is cheap in advance and expensive in the moment. Businesses discover this the week a supplier fails.
You have no named alternative for your most critical input.
Modest automation value — maintain the register and automate the reminder to review it. The qualification of alternatives is relationship and commercial work.
The overall ability of your supply to withstand disruption.
Resilience determines whether a disruption is an inconvenience or an existential event. It is a design property, not a reaction.
A two-week supply interruption has never been thought through.
Automate early warning where signals exist — supplier financial alerts, lead-time drift, single-source flags. The resilience decisions themselves, including whether to carry buffer stock, are commercial judgements about risk appetite.
Major category 16 of the 26-Point Business Performance framework, in the Business Operations general category.
Who is responsible for what, written down and current.
Unclear responsibility is the most common cause of work falling through gaps, and of two people doing the same thing. It also makes performance impossible to discuss fairly.
Tasks are assigned by who is available rather than by whose job it is.
Low automation potential — this is organisational design. Keep the responsibility map in one accessible place and review it whenever someone joins or leaves; automate only the reminder to do so.
The capabilities the business needs, against the ones it has.
Skill gaps show up as slow delivery and quality problems long before anyone calls them skill gaps. Naming them turns a vague frustration into a hiring or training decision.
Certain work waits for one specific person because nobody else can do it.
Maintain a simple skills matrix and automate the gap and single-point-of-failure report. Deciding whether to buy, build or outsource a capability is a management call.
How you find, assess and hire people, and how deliberate that process is.
A bad hire in a small business is disproportionately expensive — in salary, in management time, and in the customers affected while it plays out.
Hiring starts when someone leaves and finishes as fast as possible.
High automation fit on the mechanics: job posting, application tracking, screening against defined criteria, scheduling and communication with candidates. Keep assessment human and structured — automated screening trained on your past hires will reproduce your past mistakes.
How a new person gets from first day to fully productive.
Nine for time. Onboarding is where the cost of hiring is either recovered quickly or bled slowly, and it is usually improvised.
New starters spend their first week working out who to ask.
Very high automation potential: a structured plan with scheduled tasks, access and equipment provisioning triggered on start date, training assignments and check-ins. Build it once and every subsequent hire is faster.
How people build capability after they arrive.
Training is what allows delegation, and delegation is what releases owner time. It is also one of the strongest retention factors for good people.
Development happens only when someone requests it.
Automate the scheduling, assignment, tracking and reminders; the coaching itself is human. Tie training directly to the skills-matrix gaps so it is targeted rather than generic.
How performance is set, discussed and acted on.
Without a rhythm, performance problems are tolerated until they become resignations or dismissals, both expensive. Good performers also go unrecognised.
Performance conversations happen when there is a problem.
Automate the cadence, the record and the objective data that feeds the conversation. The conversation is the point and cannot be delegated to software.
What people actually produce relative to the resource they cost.
Productivity per person is the number that tells you whether growth is compounding or just getting bigger. It is also where operational improvements show up.
Revenue per employee has been flat or falling as the business has grown.
Automate the measurement at team and business level. Be careful: individual productivity metrics applied without judgement damage collaboration and encourage the wrong behaviour.
How people are paid and rewarded relative to the market and to their contribution.
Pay is rarely the reason good people join and frequently the reason they leave. Getting it approximately right removes a distraction; getting it wrong is expensive in turnover.
You do not know how your pay compares to the local market for your key roles.
Modest. Benchmark data gathering and payroll administration automate well; the reward structure is a judgement about behaviour and fairness that should not be outsourced to a formula.
Keeping the people you would be damaged by losing, and knowing who they are.
Turnover costs recruitment, lost productivity, and the knowledge that leaves with the person. In a small team, one departure can remove a capability entirely.
Good people leave and the reason is discovered afterwards, if at all.
Automate the signals — tenure, engagement responses, absence and workload patterns — into a simple risk view, and run structured exit interviews recorded consistently. Acting on the signal is management work.
What happens to each critical role if the person in it leaves.
Succession is low-urgency and high-consequence, which is why it is almost universally deferred. It is also directly linked to whether the business can be sold.
For at least one role, the honest answer to "what if they left tomorrow?" is that things would stop.
Barely automatable — three out of ten. The one mechanism that helps is systematic documentation and cross-training, which is a deliberate programme rather than a tool. Start with the role whose absence would hurt most.
Matching the people you will have to the work you expect.
Reactive hiring is expensive and slow; it also means capacity arrives after the demand that needed it. Planning converts panic hiring into scheduled hiring.
Hiring decisions are made in the month they become urgent.
Combine pipeline forecast and capacity data into a forward staffing view, refreshed automatically. It will not be exactly right, but it converts a surprise into a lead time.
Major category 17 of the 26-Point Business Performance framework, in the Business Operations general category.
How decisions get made — who decides, on what basis, and how fast.
Nine out of ten financially. Decision quality and speed compound across every other area; a business that decides slowly pays for it everywhere at once.
Decisions wait for the owner even when they should not.
Low direct automation. What helps is removing the two common blockers: missing information, which good reporting fixes, and undefined authority, which a written delegation matrix fixes. The decision itself is the job.
Choosing what gets attention now and what does not.
Prioritisation is the main lever a leader has over throughput. Without it, the team works on everything and finishes little.
The team is busy and the important things are not moving.
Automate the visibility — one list, work-in-progress limits, ageing alerts — so the cost of doing everything at once is visible. Ranking remains a judgement call made against strategy.
Whether commitments are kept and whether anything follows when they are not.
Accountability is what makes every other system real. Where it is absent, processes decay into suggestions.
Actions from meetings are frequently not done and this passes without comment.
Four out of ten — deliberately low. Automate the record of who committed to what by when and the reminder. Software cannot supply the follow-through, and a business that installs tracking software instead of addressing accountability has bought a report about its problem.
Passing work and authority to others properly, with the decision rights that make it workable.
Delegation is the mechanism by which an owner-dependent business becomes a business. Under-delegation is the most common growth ceiling in the framework.
The owner is still the final approver on routine decisions.
Automate the guardrails that make delegation safe: authority limits, approval thresholds, exception alerts and visible reporting. Most under-delegation is a control problem, and controls can be automated where trust cannot.
How information moves between leadership and the team.
Communication failures look like performance failures. People cannot execute against context they do not have.
Staff learn about significant changes informally.
Automate the cadence and distribution — regular structured updates assembled from live data — so communication does not depend on the leader having a quiet week.
Setting out what will be done, by whom, by when, at business and team level.
Planning converts intention into scheduled capacity. Without it, strategy competes with today's urgent work and loses every time.
Plans exist for delivery work but not for improvement work.
Planning tools handle the mechanics well: dependencies, capacity, scheduling and automatic status roll-up. The plan's content and its trade-offs are leadership work.
The rhythm of meetings and reviews that keeps the business on course.
Cadence is what stops management being reactive. A predictable weekly and monthly rhythm removes most of the ad-hoc interruption that fragments an owner's day.
Management meetings happen when there is a problem.
Good automation fit: fixed agendas, packs generated from live data before the meeting, actions captured and carried forward automatically. Turning up prepared is most of the value of a meeting.
How problems get diagnosed and fixed rather than absorbed.
Businesses that treat symptoms repeatedly pay for the same problem many times. Root-cause discipline is what converts recurring cost into a one-off fix.
The same issue has been "dealt with" more than three times.
Automate the pattern detection — issue logging with cause codes and recurrence reporting — so repeat problems announce themselves. Diagnosis and fix are human.
Keeping an accurate, current view of how the business and its people are performing.
Oversight is the difference between managing and reacting. Late information turns a manageable variance into a crisis.
You find out about performance problems from the monthly accounts.
Strong automation fit. Live dashboards for the handful of measures that matter, exception alerts on thresholds, and no manual report assembly. Aim for fewer measures watched properly rather than many watched never.
Developing the capability of the people you manage.
Coaching multiplies rather than adds. It is the mechanism by which management capacity grows faster than headcount.
Managers solve their team's problems for them.
Modest. Automate the cadence, records and development plans; the coaching is irreducibly personal and attempts to systematise it into a form-filling exercise reliably kill it.
Whether the business can lead itself if the current leader is absent.
Three out of ten for automation and high in consequence. Leadership continuity determines whether the business is an asset that can be sold or a job that ends when you stop.
A two-week absence by the owner would require constant contact.
Not an automation problem. It is solved by documented decisions, delegated authority, a second line of management and a deliberate test — take the two weeks and see what breaks. Then fix what broke.
Major category 18 of the 26-Point Business Performance framework, in the Business Operations general category.
Whether the stated values describe how the business actually behaves under pressure.
Values that are contradicted by decisions are worse than no values — they teach the team that stated commitments are decorative.
A recent decision plainly contradicted a value on the wall and nobody mentioned it.
Two out of ten. There is no product for this. The only mechanism that works is leaders visibly making a costly decision consistent with the value, and saying why.
The behaviour that is expected, tolerated and refused.
The standard is set by the worst behaviour leadership accepts, not by the one it announces. Everyone in the business knows which is which.
A high performer behaves in a way others would be pulled up for.
Three out of ten. Document the standard and make it part of induction; the enforcement is a management act.
Whether people trust leadership and each other enough to work without defensive overhead.
Low trust is a hidden tax on everything — more checking, more meetings, more cc'd emails, slower decisions.
People copy their manager into routine correspondence to protect themselves.
Two out of ten, the lowest in the framework alongside purpose. Trust is built by consistency between what is said and what is done. No system produces it, and surveillance tooling actively destroys it.
Whether people take ownership of outcomes rather than of tasks.
Task accountability produces work that is technically complete and practically useless. Outcome accountability is what makes a small team effective.
People report that their part is done while the overall thing has not happened.
Three out of ten. Assign outcomes rather than activities and make the outcome visible. Software can show the outcome; it cannot make someone own it.
Whether information moves across the team as well as down it.
Poor internal communication produces duplicated work and decisions made without context — both expensive and both usually invisible to leadership.
Two people discover they have been working on the same thing.
The most automatable line in this category, at six. Shared visibility of work in progress, a single channel per topic and searchable history remove a real share of communication failures.
How well people work across roles and functions.
Most operational failures happen at the joins between roles. Collaboration quality determines how expensive those joins are.
Hand-offs between functions routinely lose information or time.
Moderate. Shared workflow tooling removes the mechanical friction at hand-offs; the willingness to help someone else's work succeed is cultural.
Whether people act on problems they see, including ones outside their remit.
Ownership is what makes a business self-correcting. Its absence means every problem waits for a manager to notice it.
Known problems persist because they were nobody's job.
Three out of ten. Make it easy and safe to raise something and visibly act on what is raised. The tooling is trivial; whether raising things is rewarded or punished is the actual variable.
Whether people are invested in the work or serving out the day.
Engagement shows up in discretionary effort — the small extra judgement that separates adequate delivery from excellent. It cannot be instructed.
Work is done exactly to spec and no further, consistently.
Automate the measurement lightly — short, regular, anonymous, and only if you will act on it. An engagement survey that produces no visible change reduces engagement.
How disagreement is handled — surfaced and resolved, or avoided until it festers.
Unresolved conflict consumes attention and eventually costs people. Avoidance is more expensive than the argument would have been.
Two people or teams have stopped dealing with each other directly.
Four out of ten and mostly administrative — a clear escalation path and a record. Resolution is a conversation someone has to have.
Whether people can raise problems, admit mistakes and disagree without cost.
Without it, you find out about problems late and expensively. Every quality and safety system depends on people being willing to report bad news.
Mistakes are discovered rather than reported.
Three out of ten. Anonymous channels help at the margin. What determines it is what visibly happens to the first person who brings bad news.
Whether the whole business is pulling in the same direction.
Misalignment wastes effort at full speed. It is more expensive than under-performance because the work still costs the same.
Two teams are optimising for measures that work against each other.
Three out of ten. Check the incentives before the culture — most apparent misalignment is people responding rationally to conflicting measures. That part is fixable by design.
Major category 19 of the 26-Point Business Performance framework, in the Business Operations general category.
Total income, and — more usefully — its composition by product, segment and channel.
Revenue is the headline everyone watches and the least informative number on its own. Its breakdown is where the decisions are.
You know this month's revenue but not which third of it produced most of the profit.
Automate the split at source by tagging every transaction, then report revenue by dimension monthly. Once revenue is only ever seen as one number, every downstream decision is made blind.
The rate and source of revenue change over time.
Growth from new customers, from price, and from existing customers buying more are three different businesses with three different costs. Aggregate growth hides which one you have.
Growth is reported as a percentage with no decomposition.
Automate the decomposition — new versus existing, volume versus price — and trend it. This is a straightforward query that changes how growth is understood.
Revenue less the direct cost of delivering it, in currency.
Gross profit is what actually funds the business — overheads, growth and the owner. Revenue growth with flat gross profit is work without reward.
Revenue is up and the bank balance is not.
Ensure cost of sale is correctly classified in the accounting system, then report gross profit monthly and automatically. Misclassified costs are the most common reason this number is wrong.
The same figure as a percentage — how much of each dollar of revenue survives delivery.
Margin is the efficiency measure. Two businesses with identical revenue and different margins are not comparable in any way that matters.
Margin percentage is unknown, or known only as an annual figure.
Automate monthly margin reporting by offering and segment, with alerts when it drifts outside a band. Trend matters more than level: a slowly falling margin is the most common quiet failure in small business.
The cost of running the business independent of delivery volume.
Nine for time, ten for both financial impact and automation. Overheads accumulate by subscription and habit, and almost every business carries spend nobody has questioned in years.
You would struggle to list every recurring payment leaving the account.
High-value and easy: automated categorisation of all recurring spend, a subscription register, variance alerts against budget, and an annual forced review of every line. This routinely finds real money in the first pass.
What is left after overheads — the profit from actually operating.
Operating profit is the honest measure of the business as a machine, before financing and one-offs. It is what a buyer would look at first.
Profitability is assessed by how much cash is in the account.
Automate monthly management accounts so this number exists within days of month end rather than at year end. Late financial information is the same as no financial information.
The final result after everything, including tax, interest and one-offs.
Net profit is what the business actually made. It is also what compounds, funds resilience, and determines what the business is worth.
Net profit is discovered once a year from the accountant.
Automate the reporting pipeline end to end. The value is in frequency: a monthly view lets you correct a bad year in month four instead of learning about it in month fifteen.
Margins at every level, tracked over time and against comparable businesses.
Margin trends are the earliest reliable warning of a structural problem — pricing, cost creep or mix shift — and they move long before revenue does.
Margins have moved several points over two years and nobody has explained why.
Automate the trend view with variance analysis so movements come with an attributable cause rather than requiring an investigation each time.
What one unit — a job, a customer, a product — makes or loses.
Unit economics decide whether growth helps or hurts. Scaling a business with negative unit economics accelerates the loss, which is a well-documented way to fail while looking successful.
You are confident about total profitability but cannot state profit per job.
High automation potential: allocate revenue and cost to the unit automatically and report contribution per unit. Approximate allocation applied consistently is far more useful than perfect allocation never done.
What the business returns on the money and assets tied up in it.
Return on capital is what tells you whether the business is worth the investment relative to alternatives — including the owner's own time and money.
Investment decisions are made on affordability rather than on return.
Automate the tracking of what each investment was expected to return and what it actually returned. Most businesses never close that loop, so the same category of investment gets repeated.
The direction and pattern of the financial numbers over time, including seasonality.
Ten out of ten for automation. Single-period figures mislead constantly; trends are where the truth is, and assembling them by hand is exactly the work software should absorb.
Financial review consists of comparing this month to last month.
Automate rolling twelve-month views, year-on-year comparison and seasonality-adjusted trends. This is a build-once asset that improves every financial conversation thereafter.
Comparing what you planned to spend and earn against what happened.
Ten out of ten for automation and one of the highest time savers in the category. Variance is what makes a budget a control rather than a wish.
A budget exists and is not compared to actuals during the year.
Automate the comparison and the exception reporting — only variances beyond a threshold need attention. Setting the budget is judgement; policing it should be automatic.
Major category 20 of the 26-Point Business Performance framework, in the Business Operations general category.
How much cash you have right now, across every account, net of what is already committed.
Profitable businesses fail on cash, not on profit. The position is the single number an owner should be able to state without looking.
You check the bank balance to decide whether you can afford something.
Automate a daily consolidated cash position with committed outflows netted off. Bank feeds make this near-real-time and it removes a recurring source of low-grade anxiety.
Cash actually generated by trading, as distinct from accounting profit.
The gap between profit and cash is where most small-business crises live. Growth consumes cash even when it produces profit.
You are profitable on paper and short of cash in practice.
Automate a monthly operating cash flow report alongside the profit and loss. Seeing the two together is what makes the gap explicable rather than alarming.
A forward view of cash in and out, far enough ahead to act.
Nine for time, ten for financial impact and ten for automation. A forecast converts a cash crisis into a scheduled decision, and it is the highest-value financial automation most businesses can make.
Cash problems are discovered in the week they arrive.
Build a rolling 13-week forecast fed automatically from invoices, purchase orders, payroll and recurring commitments. Update it weekly without manual effort. Almost every element is already in systems you have.
Money owed to you, how old it is, and how reliably it is collected.
Ten across all three channels — the highest-rated line in the framework. Debtor management is pure recovered cash, needs no new customers, and is almost entirely automatable.
You have invoices over sixty days old and no scheduled chasing process.
Automate the whole cycle: invoice on completion, payment terms enforced, automated reminders before and after due date, escalation ladders, and an ageing report. Most small businesses are financing their customers for free without deciding to.
Money you owe, when it is due, and whether the timing is managed.
Payables are a cash lever you control directly. Paying early without reason gives away working capital; paying late without agreement costs relationships and sometimes supply.
Bills are paid whenever someone gets to them.
Automate scheduling to terms, approval workflow, duplicate-payment detection and early-payment-discount evaluation. Nine for time and ten for automation — this is administrative work that should not consume a person.
The cash tied up in stock, and whether that is the right amount.
Ten out of ten financially where it applies. Inventory is the largest reversible cash commitment most product businesses make, and it is usually sized by habit.
Stock levels are set by what feels safe.
Automate demand-based reorder points, ageing analysis and dead-stock identification. Converting excess stock to cash is often the fastest liquidity improvement available.
The cash cycle: how long money is tied up between paying for inputs and being paid by customers.
Ten out of ten financially. Shortening the cycle releases cash permanently, without borrowing and without additional sales.
You have never calculated how many days elapse between paying suppliers and being paid.
Automate the calculation from your own data and track it monthly. Then attack each component — deposits, invoicing speed, terms, stock turns. It is a single number that focuses several improvements at once.
What you owe to lenders, on what terms, and whether it is serving the business.
Debt is a tool with a cost. The risk is rarely the borrowing itself but borrowing short-term money for long-term purposes, or losing track of covenants.
You could not list every facility, rate and covenant without checking.
Maintain a facilities register with automated reminders on review dates and covenant tests. The financing structure decisions are advice-worthy and human.
The ability to meet obligations as they fall due, including under stress.
Liquidity is what buys time when something goes wrong. Businesses with adequate liquidity survive shocks that end equally profitable competitors.
You have no defined minimum cash buffer.
Automate monitoring against a stated minimum with alerts, and rerun a simple downside scenario monthly. Setting the buffer level is a risk-appetite decision.
Spending on assets — equipment, vehicles, systems, premises.
Capital decisions are large, infrequent and hard to reverse, which is exactly why they are often made on gut feel and availability of finance.
Major purchases are justified by need rather than by return.
Automate the register, depreciation, maintenance scheduling and post-purchase review against the expected return. Closing that loop is what improves the next decision.
How much money the business will need, when, and for what.
Funding raised in a hurry costs more and concedes more. Anticipating the need is worth a substantial amount in terms alone.
Funding is considered when cash is already tight.
Fall out of the rolling forecast automatically — the forecast should tell you the need before you feel it. The funding decision and negotiation are human.
How available capital is deployed between competing uses.
Ten out of ten financially. Capital allocation is arguably the owner's highest-value activity, and the one most likely to be made by default rather than by choice.
Available cash goes to whatever came up most recently.
Five out of ten and deliberately so. Automate the inputs — return data on past allocations, forecast availability — but resist frameworks that score decisions automatically. This is judgement about the future of the business.
How long the business can operate at current burn without new revenue.
Runway converts financial risk into a number of weeks, which is the only form in which most owners can act on it.
You cannot state how many weeks the business could survive a severe downturn.
Compute automatically from the cash position and forecast, and display it prominently. Under stress it becomes the most important number in the business, so it should already exist when that happens.
21. Data, Measurement & Decision Intelligence
Data, Measurement & Decision Intelligence
Major category 21 of the 26-Point Business Performance framework, in the Business Operations general category.
The small set of measures that actually tell you whether the business is working.
Measuring everything is the same as measuring nothing. A short list, watched consistently, changes behaviour; a long dashboard nobody reads does not.
You track more than a dozen measures and act on none of them weekly.
Automate collection and display; choose the measures by hand. Aim for five to seven, each with an owner and a threshold that triggers a conversation.
Whether the numbers can be trusted — complete, current, and consistently defined.
Bad data is worse than no data because it is acted upon. Most disputes about reports are really disputes about definitions.
Two reports of the same thing produce different numbers.
Automate validation at entry, reconciliation between systems, and completeness checks with alerts. Write down the definition of each measure once, and reference it from every report.
Whether the people who need data can get it without asking someone.
Nine for time, ten for automation. Every report request that goes through a person is a queue, a delay, and a decision made later than it should have been.
Getting a number means asking the owner or the bookkeeper.
Self-service dashboards with appropriate access control. Automating a report request is good; removing the need to request it is better.
The regular reporting that tells the business how it is doing.
Ten for time, ten for automation. Manual report assembly is one of the largest recurring time costs in a small business and adds no value at all — the value is in reading it.
Someone spends a day each month building the management pack.
Automate end to end: scheduled, generated from source systems, delivered without anyone touching it. Free the time for interpretation, which is the part that actually helps.
Live visual views of current performance, built for the decisions they support.
A dashboard makes the state of the business ambient rather than requested. Its value is in reducing the delay between something changing and someone noticing.
You find out about a drop weeks after it started.
Build few, build them for decisions, and automate the refresh. Resist the temptation to include everything available — a dashboard with forty tiles is a wall, not a tool.
Being able to see, at any time, how the business is performing financially and operationally.
Nine for both time and financial, ten for automation. Visibility is what shortens the gap between a problem starting and a decision being made.
Financial and operational data live in separate places and are never seen together.
Integrate the accounting, CRM and operational systems into one reporting layer. This is the foundational data project for a small business and it pays back across every other category in this framework.
Predicting what is likely to happen, in revenue, demand, cash and capacity.
Nine, nine and ten. Forecasting converts management from reactive to planned, and it is the highest-value analytical capability a small business can develop.
Planning is based on last year plus a percentage.
Automate forecasts from pipeline, seasonality and historical conversion, and — importantly — automate the comparison of past forecasts to actuals so accuracy improves. An unreviewed forecast never gets better.
Understanding customer behaviour from data: cohorts, segments, patterns, and what predicts churn.
Ten out of ten for automation. Customer analytics is where the data you already hold turns into retention and revenue decisions.
You have years of transaction history and have never analysed it.
Automate cohort retention, segment profitability, purchase-interval and churn-risk analysis. The data almost always exists already; the analysis is the missing piece and it is a scheduled job.
Seeing direction of travel rather than isolated points.
Nine for time, ten for automation. Single-period comparisons produce false alarms and missed declines in roughly equal measure.
Reporting is month-versus-month with no longer view.
Rolling averages, year-on-year comparison and trend lines on every key measure, generated automatically. Cheap to add and it materially improves the quality of every review.
Measuring whether the changes you make actually work.
Without measurement, every change is believed to have worked and the business accumulates unfounded convictions.
You cannot say whether last quarter's marketing change helped.
Automate before-and-after measurement with a defined metric and window agreed in advance. Define success before you start — deciding afterwards is how every change comes to look successful.
Whether decisions actually use the evidence available.
Nine out of ten financially. Data that exists but does not change decisions is a cost with no return, and this is a very common state.
Reports are produced and decisions are still made on instinct.
Seven out of ten — partly a process problem. Put the relevant data into the meeting where the decision is made, in advance, automatically. The habit of asking "what does the data say?" is cultural, but the answer being to hand is systemic.
One agreed place where each important number lives.
Nine for time, ten for automation. Competing versions of the truth waste time in reconciliation and, worse, undermine confidence in all the numbers including the correct ones.
Meetings begin by arguing about whose figure is right.
Designate the source system for each domain, integrate rather than duplicate, and generate every report from those sources. This is an architectural decision worth making explicitly and early.
Major category 22 of the 26-Point Business Performance framework, in the Technology & Future general category.
The systems the business actually runs on — accounting, CRM, operations, communications.
Nine out of ten for time. Core systems determine what is possible everywhere else; a business on the wrong tools pays for it in every process it runs.
Critical business information lives in spreadsheets emailed between people.
Choose deliberately, then integrate. Fewer, well-connected systems beat more, better ones — most small-business technology pain is integration pain rather than capability pain.
Whether the software you have actually fits how the business works.
Poor fit produces workarounds, and workarounds become undocumented process that only one person understands.
Staff maintain a spreadsheet alongside the system because the system does not do something.
Audit the workarounds — each one is evidence of a fit gap. Change the tool or change the process deliberately, rather than letting a shadow system grow.
Whether your systems talk to each other automatically.
Ten for time and ten for automation — the highest combined technology score in the framework. Integration is the prerequisite for most other automation, and its absence is the direct cause of duplication and data conflict.
The same information is typed into two systems.
The highest-return technology work available to most small businesses. Prefer native integrations, then integration platforms, then custom work. Start with the two systems whose disconnection costs the most re-keying.
Whether the systems the business depends on are available when they are needed.
Downtime stops revenue and support simultaneously. For a small business the cost is rarely modelled until it happens.
Outages are discovered by staff or customers rather than by monitoring.
Automated uptime monitoring and alerting on every business-critical service. Cheap, quick, and the difference between finding out first and finding out from a customer.
Whether systems are fast enough not to slow the work down.
Slow systems tax every transaction. A few seconds per operation, several hundred times a day, is a real person's worth of time.
Staff have learned to work around slow screens.
Automated performance monitoring with alerting on degradation. Performance usually decays gradually, so without measurement nobody notices until it is severe.
Whether the technology can carry substantially more volume without redesign.
Scalability limits show up exactly when growth arrives — the worst possible time to discover them.
You know a particular system will not cope at double the volume and have no plan.
Automate load and capacity monitoring so the ceiling is visible in advance. The architectural decision to change is human, and it should be made before the ceiling is reached, not after.
Protection against unauthorised access, data loss and attack.
Nine out of ten financially. Small businesses are targeted precisely because their defences are weak, and a serious incident is frequently terminal rather than merely expensive.
Password reuse is common, or multi-factor authentication is not enforced.
High automation potential on the essentials: enforced multi-factor authentication, a password manager, automatic patching, endpoint protection, email filtering and access reviews. Do these before anything sophisticated — they cover the overwhelming majority of real incidents.
Whether you can actually restore data and operations after a failure.
Ten out of ten for automation. A backup that has never been restored is a belief, not a control.
You have backups and have never tested restoring one.
Automate the backups, and automate the restore test on a schedule. Testing is the part people skip and the part that determines whether the backup was worth anything.
The accumulated shortcuts, unsupported versions and fragile workarounds in your systems.
Technical debt is a tax on change. It makes every future improvement slower and more likely to break something.
Nobody wants to touch a particular system because it might break.
Maintain a register with the risk of each item, and automate detection of unsupported versions and end-of-life software. Paying it down is scheduled work that has to be deliberately funded.
Whether the software you pay for is actually used, and used properly.
Nine out of ten for time. Most businesses pay for capability they never turned on and licences nobody uses — and the unused capability is often what they were about to buy something else for.
You are paying for licences for people who have left.
Automate a licence and usage audit against the subscription register. This routinely reduces cost and improves capability in the same pass, which is rare.
Whether you can get your data out in a usable form.
Portability is what preserves your ability to change supplier. Without it, every system decision is permanent by default.
You have not checked whether you could export your customer history.
Automate regular exports of your critical data into a format you control. Test that an export is actually usable — a locked PDF is not portability.
Total spend on technology, and what it returns.
Technology cost accumulates a subscription at a time and is rarely reviewed as a whole. The total frequently surprises the owner.
You cannot state annual technology spend without adding it up.
Automate a technology spend register from bank and card feeds, with renewal reminders before each auto-renewal. The reminder is what turns a review into an actual decision.
Major category 23 of the 26-Point Business Performance framework, in the Technology & Future general category.
Work that is done the same way, repeatedly, by a person.
Ten for time and ten for automation. Repetitive work is where automation pays back fastest and most predictably, and every business has more of it than it thinks.
Someone can describe their task as a sequence of steps with no judgement in it.
List the repetitive tasks, multiply each by frequency and time, and rank by total hours. Automate top-down. Simplify or eliminate the task before automating it — automating waste just makes it faster.
Data entry, filing, scheduling, chasing, reconciling and re-keying.
Ten out of ten for time. Administration is the largest single consumer of owner and staff hours in most small businesses and produces no value the customer can see.
Several hours a week are spent moving information between systems.
Attack it in order: eliminate the need, then integrate so it happens once, then automate what remains. Integration usually removes more admin than any dedicated automation tool.
Multi-step processes that run themselves, with people only where judgement is required.
Ten for time and ten for automation. Workflow automation is what allows a business to grow throughput without growing headcount proportionally.
Processes stall waiting for someone to notice it is their turn.
Automate hand-offs, notifications, task creation and status. Model the process honestly first, including the exceptions — automation that only handles the ideal path pushes all the difficulty onto the people handling the rest.
Systems exchanging data directly rather than through a person.
Ten and ten. This is the plumbing that makes everything else in the category possible, and its absence is the reason most automation projects stall.
Your automation ideas all require someone to export a file first.
Prioritise integration ahead of tooling. A connected stack with modest tools outperforms a disconnected stack with excellent ones.
Using AI to help people work faster — drafting, summarising, analysing, answering.
Nine for time, ten for automation. Assistance is the lowest-risk form of AI adoption because a person remains in the loop and accountable.
Staff spend significant time drafting routine documents and summarising information.
Start here rather than with autonomous systems: drafting replies, summarising calls and documents, preparing first-pass analysis. Set a clear policy on confidential data, and verify anything factual before it leaves the business.
Work that could be handed to an AI agent to run rather than merely assist with.
Nine and ten. Agentic automation extends reach substantially, and it also extends the consequences of a mistake, which is why it needs governance rather than enthusiasm.
You have processes that are fully rule-based and still consume a person.
Choose tasks that are reversible, observable and bounded. Require an audit trail. Run in shadow mode against human output before handing over. Never give an agent an irreversible action — payment, deletion, external commitment — without an approval step.
Finding information the business already holds, when it is needed.
Ten for time, ten for automation. Search is invisible time: minutes at a stretch, dozens of times a day, and never recorded anywhere.
People ask a colleague for information that exists in a document somewhere.
A well-scoped retrieval system over your own documents, procedures and history is one of the highest-return AI applications for a small business. It requires the content to exist first — which is why documentation is worth doing.
Reports that produce and distribute themselves.
Ten and ten. Manual reporting is recurring, entirely mechanical work whose only value is in being read.
A person builds the same report every week.
Automate assembly, generation and distribution. Add an interpretation layer only once the numbers are trusted — commentary generated on top of doubtful data spreads the doubt rather than resolving it.
Deciding deliberately where a human must approve before something proceeds.
Seven out of ten and lower than the rest of the category, which is the point. Approvals are the control that makes automation safe, and each one is a deliberate trade of speed for assurance.
Either everything needs approval, or nothing does.
Set thresholds by risk and reversibility rather than by habit: automate the routine, require approval for the material, and always for anything irreversible or externally visible. Review the thresholds as confidence grows — an approval gate nobody ever declines is theatre.
What happens when an automated process meets a case it cannot handle.
Exceptions determine whether automation actually saves time. A system that automates 80% and dumps the rest, unlabelled, on a person can leave the workload unchanged.
Automated processes fail silently and are discovered later.
Design exception handling with the happy path, not after it: detection, clear routing to a person, enough context to resolve it, and reporting on exception rates by cause. Falling exception rates are the real measure of an automation maturing.
The actual improvement in output per person from automation to date.
Ten for time and ten financially. This is the outcome the whole category exists to produce, and it is the honest test of whether the tooling worked.
You have automated several things and cannot say whether anyone has more time.
Measure before and after: hours on the task, throughput, error rate. Automation that does not release time or capacity has usually just moved the work somewhere less visible.
What each automation cost and what it returned.
Ten out of ten financially. Tracking return is what stops automation becoming a technology habit rather than a business decision.
Automation spend has never been evaluated after the fact.
Record expected benefit before building, measure actual after, and review. Kill the ones that did not work — including, when the evidence says so, ones you were personally attached to.
24. Governance, Risk, Compliance & Security
Major category 24 of the 26-Point Business Performance framework, in the Technology & Future general category.
The legal obligations that attach to your business — entity, employment, consumer, tax, sector-specific.
Obligations do not depend on knowing about them. The cost of a breach is usually far higher than the cost of having checked.
Nobody in the business could list your principal legal obligations.
Maintain an obligations register with an owner and a review date for each, and automate the reminders. Interpretation is a professional-advice question, not a software one.
Meeting the specific regulatory requirements of your industry, and being able to show it.
Regulators generally accept evidence, not assurances. Compliance without records is indistinguishable from non-compliance during an audit.
You believe you are compliant but could not evidence it quickly.
Automate evidence collection as a by-product of doing the work — timestamps, sign-offs, records generated by the system rather than assembled later. Automate the calendar of recurring obligations.
The agreements you have with customers, suppliers and staff — current, signed and findable.
Contracts decide who carries risk. Missing, expired or unsigned contracts are discovered during disputes, which is the most expensive time to find out.
You could not produce a signed current contract for every major customer within an hour.
High automation potential: a contract register with key dates, automated renewal and expiry alerts, templated generation and e-signature. Getting terms drafted is legal work; never losing track of them is systems work.
Cover appropriate to the risks the business actually carries.
Insurance is the cheapest transfer of catastrophic risk available, and it is commonly set once at formation and never revisited as the business changes.
Your cover has not been reviewed since the business materially changed.
Four out of ten — mostly a reminder to review annually against a current risk register. The adequacy assessment needs a broker or adviser who knows your sector.
How personal information is collected, stored, used and disposed of.
Privacy obligations apply to almost every business now, and breaches carry both regulatory and reputational cost. Customers increasingly ask.
You do not know everywhere customer personal data is stored.
Automate the discoverable parts: data inventory, retention and deletion schedules, access controls and consent records. Build deletion in from the start — retrofitting it is far harder.
Protecting systems and data from attack, and being ready when one happens.
Nine out of ten financially. Security incidents in small businesses frequently cause more damage than the business can absorb, and preparation is dramatically cheaper than response.
You have no written plan for what to do in the first hour of a breach.
Automate the fundamentals — enforced multi-factor authentication, patching, endpoint protection, email filtering, access reviews, monitoring and alerting. Write the incident response plan and rehearse it once; the rehearsal is what makes it real.
The controls that stop money leaving the business incorrectly.
Nine out of ten financially and one of the areas where small businesses are most exposed, because segregation of duties is difficult with few people.
One person can raise, approve and pay an invoice.
High automation potential and a genuine substitute for headcount: approval thresholds, dual authorisation for payments above a limit, automated reconciliation, and exception reporting. Where you cannot segregate duties, compensate with visibility.
Defences against fraud committed from outside the business and from within it.
Nine out of ten financially. Small-business fraud is usually committed by trusted people over long periods precisely because nobody was looking.
Bank details for suppliers can be changed without independent verification.
Automate detection: duplicate payments, unusual patterns, out-of-hours transactions, supplier bank-detail change alerts, and mandatory callback verification. These controls are cheap and they work.
Who is allowed to commit the business, to what value, and in what circumstances.
Undefined authority produces both bottlenecks and unauthorised commitments — often in the same business at the same time.
Spending limits are informal and inconsistently applied.
Write the delegation matrix, then enforce it in the systems where the commitments are made. This is one of the clearest cases where a policy becomes real only once it is encoded.
The risks arising from how the business runs day to day.
Operational risks are the ones most likely to actually happen. They are also the ones least likely to have been written down.
Risk is discussed only after an incident.
Maintain a risk register with likelihood, impact and a named owner, and automate the review cadence. Identification is a structured conversation; the discipline of revisiting it should be systemic.
The plan for continuing to operate when something significant goes wrong.
The difference between a disruption and a closure is usually preparation. Most small businesses have never written this down.
You have no plan for losing premises, systems or a key person for two weeks.
Automate the technical elements — backups, failover, contact lists kept current. The plan itself is a short document and a rehearsal; both are cheap and neither happens without being scheduled.
A standing process for spotting risks before they materialise.
Risk identification is what converts governance from documentation into something that changes decisions.
The risk register, if it exists, has not changed in a year.
Automate the monitoring where there are signals — financial thresholds, security alerts, supplier warnings, compliance dates, concentration measures. Route them to a person with authority to act, and review the register on a fixed cadence.
Major category 25 of the 26-Point Business Performance framework, in the Technology & Future general category.
Systematically noticing what is changing with customers and in the market.
Adaptation starts with detection. Businesses rarely fail because they could not change; they fail because they noticed too late.
Changes in customer behaviour are recognised only in hindsight.
High automation potential. Automate the listening — feedback themes, lost-deal reasons, search trends, competitor moves, support-ticket topics — into a monthly synthesis. This is exactly the kind of continuous scanning people cannot sustain manually.
Capturing suggestions from staff, customers and delivery, in one place.
The best improvement ideas are usually already inside the business and are lost because there is nowhere to put them.
Good ideas are mentioned in conversation and never seen again.
A single capture channel with automatic acknowledgement, clustering of similar items, and a visible status for each. The acknowledgement matters — ideas stop arriving when they appear to vanish.
Running deliberate, small tests instead of arguing about opinions.
Experimentation converts disagreement into evidence at low cost. It is also the only reliable defence against confidently held wrong beliefs.
Changes are made wholesale and their effect is never isolated.
Automate the mechanics — test setup, measurement, and results reporting against a metric defined in advance. Agree the success criterion before running, or every result will be interpreted as a success.
Meaningful improvement to what you sell, not just how you sell it.
Nine out of ten financially. Offer innovation is what resets pricing power; process improvement makes the current offer cheaper to deliver, which is a smaller prize.
Your offer is essentially unchanged while your market has moved.
Six out of ten. Automation supports the inputs — demand signals, feedback analysis, rapid validation — but designing a better offer is creative and commercial work that should not be outsourced to a tool.
Adopting new technology at a sensible pace — neither first nor last.
Eight across the board. Technology adoption is now one of the main sources of competitive difference between otherwise similar small businesses.
Technology decisions are made only when something breaks.
Keep a standing evaluation cadence and a short pilot process, so adoption is a routine rather than an upheaval. Pilot small, measure, then commit or stop.
Whether the business gets better from what happens to it.
Organisations that do not review repeat their mistakes at full cost. Learning is what makes experience compound instead of merely accumulate.
Projects end without any review of what happened.
Automate the trigger and the record — a short structured review at the end of every significant piece of work, with findings stored where they will be found next time. The review itself is a conversation.
How change is actually landed with the people who have to do it.
Four out of ten for automation — one of the lowest in this general category, and rightly. Most failed changes were sound decisions that were implemented at people rather than with them.
New systems and processes are announced and then quietly not used.
Automate only the logistics: communication, training assignment and adoption tracking. Adoption data tells you where a change has not landed; the response has to be human.
How quickly the business can respond once it decides to.
Speed of adaptation is a durable advantage for a small business — it is the one thing a larger competitor structurally cannot match.
The time between deciding and doing is measured in months.
Five out of ten. Some delay is process and is automatable; most is decision latency, approval queues and competing priorities. Measure elapsed time from decision to live, and attack the largest gap.
Spotting new opportunities — segments, offerings, channels, partnerships.
Opportunity identification is what keeps the growth pipeline from depending entirely on the existing offer.
Opportunities are considered only when someone brings one in.
Automate the inputs — market monitoring, customer request analysis, adjacency mapping from your own data — into a standing list. Which to pursue is a strategy decision.
A managed set of improvement and innovation initiatives at different stages.
A pipeline prevents both famine and the more common failure of running everything at once and finishing nothing.
Innovation happens in bursts followed by nothing.
Manage the pipeline in one place with stage gates, work-in-progress limits and automated status. Stage gates are also permission to stop things, which is the harder and more valuable half.
How you respond when a competitor changes something material.
Reflexive response is expensive — matching a discount often costs more than the business it protects. A considered response requires having thought about it in advance.
Competitor moves trigger immediate reaction without analysis.
Automate the detection and the alert. The response should be deliberate, and the first question should be whether the move actually affects your customers or only your pride.
26. Resilience, Scalability & Enterprise Independence
Resilience, Scalability & Enterprise Independence
Major category 26 of the 26-Point Business Performance framework, in the Technology & Future general category.
How much of the business depends on the founder personally.
Founder dependency is the single largest discount applied when a small business is valued, and the main reason owners cannot take a holiday.
Revenue would fall noticeably if the founder stopped working for a month.
Five out of ten — automation helps but does not solve it. Systematically identify what only the founder does, then document, delegate or automate each item. The relationships and judgement are the hard part and need deliberate transfer over time.
The same exposure for anyone else the business cannot function without.
Key-person risk is often larger than founder risk and much less visible, because the person is competent and never complains.
One person's two-week absence would stop a critical process.
Map single points of failure by process, then cross-train and document. Automate what is genuinely mechanical so the remaining dependency is expertise rather than access or knowledge of a routine.
How much revenue comes from too few customers.
Nine out of ten financially. Concentration is invisible while everything is fine and existential when one relationship ends.
Your largest customer accounts for a substantial share of revenue.
Automate concentration reporting with an alert against a threshold you set. The mitigation — deliberate diversification, or longer contracts, or both — is a commercial strategy decision.
The same concentration exposure measured on the supply side rather than the customer side.
A supplier who cannot deliver stops your revenue as effectively as a customer who stops buying, and usually with less warning.
One supplier is irreplaceable within your lead times.
Automate spend concentration monitoring. Qualifying alternatives before you need them is procurement work with a clear payback the first time it is used.
Critical knowledge that exists only in people's heads.
Nine for time and nine for automation. Undocumented knowledge is the mechanism by which key-person risk actually bites, and it is now far cheaper to capture than it used to be.
Answering a routine question requires finding one specific person.
High value: capture knowledge as work happens — recorded procedures, decision records, a searchable internal knowledge base. Language models make drafting documentation from a recording genuinely fast, which removes the excuse that has always been used.
Whether how the business runs is written down.
Ten out of ten for automation. Documentation is what converts a set of individuals into a business that can be trained into, delegated within, and eventually sold.
A capable new manager could not run a core process from your written material.
Generate procedures from recordings of the work being done, keep them beside the work rather than in a folder, and automate a review reminder so they do not silently go stale. Stale documentation is worse than none because it is trusted.
Whether critical functions have a backup — people, systems, premises, equipment.
Redundancy is the difference between an incident and an interruption. It costs money, which is why it should be applied deliberately to what actually matters.
Several critical functions have no alternative if the primary fails.
Automate technical redundancy and failover where it is cheap. For people and premises, decide what warrants the cost — full redundancy everywhere is not the right answer for a small business.
Whether you can actually recover systems and data after a serious failure.
Nine out of ten financially. Recovery capability is binary in effect: it either works on the day or the business discovers it does not.
Your recovery plan has never been executed as a test.
Automate backup, replication and the recovery test itself. Record how long a real restore takes and compare it to how long the business can actually tolerate being down — the gap between those two is the finding.
Continuing to serve customers through disruption.
Continuity is what determines whether customers wait for you or find someone else during the worst week of your year.
You have no plan for how customers would be served if your main site were unavailable.
Automate the technical continuity and the contact-list maintenance. Write the short plan, rehearse it once, and note that most of the value came from the rehearsal rather than the document.
Whether the business could handle substantially more volume without breaking.
Nine out of ten financially. Growth that arrives faster than the ability to deliver damages reputation permanently and is a real cause of failure.
You are not sure what would break first at double the volume.
Model the constraint — capacity, systems, cash, people — and monitor how close you are to each. Knowing which one binds first is what makes growth investment targeted rather than general.
Whether the technology can carry growth without redesign.
Systems that require re-architecture at exactly the moment you are growing fastest are the most expensive kind of constraint.
Manual workarounds already appear at peak volume.
Automate capacity monitoring against defined thresholds, and choose systems with headroom relative to your plan. The architectural decision is human and should be made before the ceiling, not at it.
Who takes over each critical role, and whether they are being prepared.
Three out of ten for automation — one of the lowest scores in the framework. Succession is a people programme, not a system, and it takes years rather than months.
There is no identified successor for the owner or for any critical role.
Very little. Keep the plan current and automate the review reminder. The actual work is identifying, developing and progressively handing over — starting long before it is needed.
Reliance on a single location, platform, market or piece of infrastructure.
Dependencies of this kind are usually invisible until the thing you depend on changes its terms, its algorithm, or its availability.
A large share of your demand comes from one platform you do not control.
Automate monitoring of the dependency's share and alert on threshold breaches. Reducing it is a strategic choice — usually building a channel you own alongside the one you rent.
Ability to operate without constant owner intervention
Whether the business runs without constant owner involvement.
Ten for time and nine financially — the summary line of the whole framework. This is what separates a business from a demanding job, and it determines whether the thing you built can ever be sold, handed over, or simply left for a fortnight.
The business needs you to make ordinary decisions every day.
This is where all twenty-six categories converge. Documented processes, delegated authority with automated guardrails, exception-based management and reporting the owner reads rather than builds. Test it honestly: leave for two weeks, see exactly what breaks, and fix that. Then do it again.