The 5 Questions That Tell You If Your Business Is Broken.
Most business owners know something is wrong. These questions tell you where the problem actually lives.
These five questions are the starting point for every diagnostic we run at SigmaSync. They're not designed to make you feel good about the business. They're designed to show you where the actual gap is.
Most business owners can answer three of the five without hesitation. The two they can't answer cleanly — that's usually where the problem is sitting.
Can the business run for two weeks without you making a decision?
Not on autopilot — just without you in the room for every call, quote, complaint, and crisis. If the answer is no, the business isn't a business yet. It's a job with your name on the door. The problem isn't the team, the tools, or the systems. The problem is that nothing has been built that works without you. That's a structural issue, and it compounds.
Signal
If this fails: delivery and delegation model needs to be rebuilt before anything else.
Do you know your gross margin per client or per job — not revenue, margin?
Revenue tells you how busy you are. Margin tells you whether that busyness is worth anything. Most business owners can quote their revenue. Very few can tell you, within a reasonable range, what they're actually keeping after cost of delivery. If you don't know the number, you can't price correctly, you can't decide which clients to take, and you can't identify which services are pulling the business backward.
Signal
If this fails: the pricing and offer structure needs a rebuild before you market or grow.
Does your pricing cover cost, pay you a real salary, and leave reinvestment capital?
These are three separate bars, and most businesses only clear the first one. Covering costs keeps the lights on. Paying yourself a market salary (not owner draws, not whatever's left) means the business is actually viable. Leaving capital to reinvest means it can grow without external funding. If your pricing only covers two of the three, you're working for less than you think — and the gap will widen as you scale.
Signal
If this fails: you're subsidising the business with your own labour. Fix pricing before volume.
Can a new team member deliver your service to your standard without you in the room?
This is the delivery documentation question, but it's really about whether your service exists as a repeatable system or as something that only works when you're personally involved. If onboarding a new team member requires weeks of shadowing, constant correction, or you picking up the pieces — the process lives in your head, not in the business. That's the bottleneck that prevents every hire from working.
Signal
If this fails: systematise delivery before your next hire. The hire won't fix it.
If revenue dropped 30% tomorrow, would you know exactly which cost to cut first?
This is a clarity question, not a fear question. Businesses that can answer it have a clear picture of their cost structure and know what's fixed, what's variable, and what's optional. Businesses that can't answer it usually have costs that crept in without scrutiny — subscriptions, roles, contractors — and no clear picture of what's load-bearing. In a downturn, that ambiguity is expensive. In growth, it's waste.
Signal
If this fails: cost visibility and financial literacy need work before you increase overheads.
“The businesses that struggle to answer these questions aren't struggling because of the market. They're struggling because the foundation was never built correctly.”
What to do with this
Go through each question honestly. Not the answer you'd give a bank or a business coach — the actual answer. Write it down.
The questions you can't answer confidently are the priority. Everything else — marketing, hiring, growth — is secondary until those foundations are solid. Trying to scale a business that fails two or three of these questions doesn't grow the business. It accelerates the problems.
If you want to work through what the answers mean for your specific situation, the discovery call is the right next step. It's free, it's honest, and it'll tell you exactly where to focus first.
Next step
Know which questions you failed?
The discovery call is 30 minutes. We'll look at what the answers mean for your business and tell you honestly what needs to change first.