Business health check
Also called: business audit · business review · business check-up
A short structured review of a business across its main areas — money, customers, team, owner load and direction — used to locate where a problem sits before committing to deeper work.
A health check is the short form of a diagnostic. It covers the same territory but at lower resolution: enough to say which area is under strain and roughly how badly, not enough to say exactly why. It is the difference between a GP appointment and a specialist referral: the first is what establishes which specialist is the right one.
Most health checks work through a fixed set of questions rather than an open conversation, and that is deliberate. An open conversation goes where the owner steers it, which is usually toward the thing they have already decided is the problem. A fixed set goes everywhere, including the areas nobody wanted to look at.
The term "business audit" is often used for the same thing, which causes confusion, because an audit in the accounting sense is an independent examination of financial statements by a registered auditor, resulting in an opinion on whether they give a true and fair view — not a check that every record is correct — and is a different exercise entirely. When a business owner says they want an audit, they usually mean a health check.
Health checks are typically run at three points: when something is wrong and nobody can name it, when a big decision is close, or when a run of fixes has not held. They add less once the problem is already named and specific — at that point the work is the fix, not another look.
What it tells you
Which area of the business is actually under strain, and whether the thing you were about to spend money on addresses it.
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Business diagnostic
A structured examination of a business — its foundation, structure, numbers and strategy — carried out before any solution is proposed, in order to find the cause of a problem rather than its symptoms.
Owner dependency
The degree to which a business only functions because the owner is personally in it — holding the knowledge, the relationships, the decisions, or the work itself.
Break-even
The level of revenue at which a business covers all of its costs and makes neither a profit nor a loss — the point where everything above it starts to be worth something.
A definition tells you what the word means. It can't tell you whether it's your problem — that takes a look at the actual business.
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