Business Health Check.

“Business health check” is the tidy phrase for it. The question underneath is usually shorter and less comfortable: is the problem where I think it is?

Most owners who get this far have already answered that privately. They have a theory. The theory has usually had money spent on it — a hire, a price rise, a new website, a round of marketing — and it didn't hold, or it held for a quarter.

That's who this is built for. Not someone who doesn't yet know anything is wrong. Someone who has lived with it long enough to have a theory, and long enough to have started doubting the theory.

The check answers the narrow version of the question. It tells you which part of the business is carrying the strain. It doesn't tell you why. That is a longer piece of work, and you shouldn't buy it until you know where to point it.

A clean set of books is not a clean bill of health

The returns went in on time. The reconciliations balanced. The year closed, the file was clean, and somewhere in that conversation you nodded along while a quieter thought sat underneath it.

Then why does it feel like this.

You are not imagining the gap. You have had good months that left nothing behind. You have watched revenue go up and watched the pressure go up with it. You have taken a week off and come back to a business that waited for you rather than one that ran without you.

None of that appears in a set of accounts. A set of accounts was never built to show it.

An audit is a question about the records — whether what happened has been captured correctly and completely, and whether the accounts give a true and fair view of where the business stands. It is precise work and it matters.

This is a question about the business. Whether the model works. Whether the price holds. Whether the thing runs without you. Whether what you have built can still get you where you said you wanted to go.

Both can come back clean at the same time. Correct books describe the position accurately. They don't tell you the position is survivable.

When an owner says they want a business audit, this is almost always the thing they mean. Whether your business needs one in the accounting sense, and what that would involve, is a question for your accountant. It isn't one a web page should answer.

What it costs to confuse the two

The cost isn't a wasted afternoon. It's the next stretch of the year.

An owner feels something is off and takes it to the accountant, because that's the person who looks at the business on paper. The accountant does the job properly. The records are in order, the returns are filed, the statements are clean. Nothing in that work was wrong, and none of it was the question that was actually being asked.

So the owner comes away reassured, and the feeling is still there in the morning. A few months on it is louder, and by then the only explanation left that fits is an outside one: not enough people know we exist. That is when the money goes out — ads, a new site, a rebrand, someone promising leads.

The expensive part was never the spend. It was the months spent being certain about the wrong thing, while the thing that was actually wrong went on compounding in the background. By the time it surfaces properly, some of the options that existed when the feeling started have quietly closed.

What the fifteen questions test

Fifteen is short on purpose. A long form gets abandoned, and the answers that matter are not the ones that take an hour to produce. Each question earns its place by changing what the other answers mean.

On the wages question in particular: there is no universal right number for a wages line. It moves with your model, your mix and who is in the chair, and the person who can tell you what yours should be is your own accountant, looking at your own accounts. What the check reads is whether you are running the business with that number in view or without it. If you want to work yours out first, the wages calculator is free and takes a minute.

Several of these ask what you know rather than what is true, and that is deliberate. “I don't know my margin per job” is not a failure to answer. It is the answer, and it is one of the more useful ones on the form. An owner who cannot say what a job leaves behind is pricing on a feeling — and that feeling is making the hiring and capacity decisions too.

It never asks for your books, and it cannot see them. Fifteen answers, your name and your email — that is everything it collects.

Now notice what the fifteen never ask about. Your competitors. The economy. Your suburb. What the market is doing.

Businesses don't fail from the outside in. They fail from the inside out. The market is rarely the problem.

Conditions are real. They are just rarely the variable you can move, and rarely the reason a business that worked stopped working. Every question on the form is about something you control.

The last question is the one that stings

How long have you been dealing with the main issue. Under six months, six to twelve, one to two years, more than two.

You knew your answer before you finished reading the options.

It is not there to measure patience. It is there because a problem that is two years old is not the same problem it was at six months. Decisions have been built on top of it. The team has quietly adjusted around it. The cost has been paid already, whether or not it was ever named.

If your honest answer is more than two years, that is not a verdict on you. It is what it usually looks like when a problem was never located, and every fix since was aimed at the symptom.

What comes back

Two things, and neither of them is a document.

On screen, straight away: one of four stages — Survive, Grow, Thrive or Sell — with a plain description of what that means from where you are standing, and the gaps your answers flagged, written as sentences rather than scores. Margin you can't name. Pricing that covers the costs but not you. A business that stops when you stop. Process that lives in your head. Then an email with the same read, so it is somewhere you can find it again.

The stage is a position, not a grade. Sell isn't a reward and Survive isn't a failure. Profitable businesses land in Survive when the foundation under the revenue won't hold another year of it, and comfortable ones land in Sell because the owner has quietly finished.

The gaps are written plainly, because their only job is to be arguable. You should be able to read one and say no, that one isn't us — and mean it.

It is not a score. No number out of a hundred, no grade, no benchmark against businesses like yours. A score only invites you to improve the score.

It is not a valuation and it is not a proposal. Nothing is quoted or priced at the end of fifteen questions. The result points at a likely next step; it does not cost one, and fifteen questions do not entitle anyone to a prescription.

It is not a report to file. A report gets saved and forgotten. This is a read, and it is worth something only in the week you use it — in the next real conversation you have, with your accountant, with the person you run the business with, or with yourself at the end of a week that went badly.

And it names an area, not a cause. Fifteen questions can tell you the strain is sitting in your pricing rather than in your team. They cannot tell you why the price is where it is. That answer is usually in a decision made years ago that nobody has revisited, and finding it takes a proper look at how the business is built — a longer piece of work than this, and a different one.

One minute, before you start

The most useful thing you can do with this takes an extra minute, and it happens before the first question. Write down, in a single line, where you think the problem is. Then compare.

If the result agrees with you, you have stopped second-guessing yourself and you can go and fix the thing. If it doesn't, the disagreement is the finding, and it is worth more than the result.

Australia or New Zealand

The check reads the same on both sides of the Tasman, because how a business is built doesn't change at the border. Margin behaves the same. Owner dependency behaves the same. Undocumented process behaves the same in Christchurch as it does in Brisbane.

One practical note. The revenue question uses dollar bands and doesn't ask which dollars. Read them in your own currency and pick the band your figure falls into. The band is there to size the business, not to convert anything.

What genuinely differs between the two countries sits downstream of the diagnosis — how you are structured, how you are taxed, what you owe your people and when, what has to be filed and with whom. This check doesn't test any of that and doesn't advise on it, and neither should a web page. That belongs with your own accountant or lawyer, in your own country, with your own numbers in front of them.

We work with owners in both.

When it's worth doing, and when it isn't

Three moments make this worth ten minutes. Something is wrong and nobody in the business can name it. A decision is close — a hire, a lease, a second location, a new offer — and you would rather not make it blind. Or a run of fixes hasn't held, and the pattern is starting to look less like bad luck and more like something structural.

There is also a point where it adds less, and we would rather say so than take ten minutes off you. If you can already name the problem precisely — the team, the numbers, the exit you can't get to — then what you need is the fix, not another look. The pages written for those situations are further down this one.

For everyone else, the fifteen questions are at the top of the page.