000-000-0000 · closed Sundays
The page the wizard links to from every screen
It is a good opening question and a bad diagnosis, and the difference matters enough to give it a page rather than a footnote.
An indicative self-assessment, not professional advice. This is an indicative self-assessment, not professional advice, and it is not a substitute for a conversation. It describes what your answers suggest — it cannot know your business, it is not compared against any other business, and nothing it produces is a projection, a valuation or a measurement.
It asks about facts you already know — how many people, what last week went on, where the revenue came from, what has stopped working — and it weighs those answers against each other to pick two or three of the six areas below. The weighing orders your own answers relative to one another. It is not out of anything, it is never shown to you, and turning it into a number on the screen is the single change that would make the whole thing dishonest.
Then it names those two or three areas in the same vocabulary the rest of this site uses, and says which engagement addresses each. That is a starting point for a conversation, which is what it is for.
Nothing here is benchmarked against anything. Nothing on this site compares your business to any other. We have not measured a sample of businesses like yours, so we cannot tell you what they typically do, and a figure presented as if we had would be invented data with a percentage sign on it.
The whole vocabulary
There is no hidden list. These are every area the assessment can name, with the words it uses and the work each one maps to — printed here so you can read the outputs before you answer the questions, and decide for yourself whether they are worth four minutes.
Direction
Your answers describe a business with more good ideas than finishing capacity. That is not a shortage of ambition and it is rarely a shortage of effort — it is usually that nothing has been deliberately stopped, so everything is running at the same low priority at once.
Maps to: Direction review, six to ten days over four to six weeks, $13,200 to $22,000.
How the work moves
Your answers point at the space between the steps rather than the steps themselves. Waiting, rework and double entry do not appear on anybody's timesheet, which is exactly why they are usually the largest single cost in a business of this size.
Maps to: Follow the job, eight to fourteen days over five to eight weeks, $14,400 to $25,200.
Dependence on you
Your answers describe decisions, relationships or knowledge that live with one person. That is normal at one size and dangerous at the next, and the point at which it becomes dangerous is usually about a year before anybody notices.
Maps to: Roles, pay and who decides, five to nine days over four to six weeks, $11,000 to $19,800.
Where the revenue comes from
Your answers describe revenue that depends heavily on a small number of customers, or on one way of winning work. Concentration is not automatically a problem, but it is always a decision, and it is worth making it on purpose.
Maps to: Where the revenue comes from, six to ten days over four to six weeks, $10,800 to $18,000.
Where the margin is
Your answers suggest the business is growing on the top line without the bottom line following it. The usual cause is that some part of the work is subsidising another part, and nothing in the monthly numbers is shaped to show which.
Maps to: Where the margin actually is, five to nine days over four to six weeks, $11,000 to $19,800.
What the business runs on
Your answers describe a business held together by memory, spreadsheets and one person who knows where things are. That works, right up until two people need the same answer on the same morning.
Maps to: Choosing and installing a system, eight to sixteen days over eight to fourteen weeks, $14,400 to $28,800.
Nowhere, until you press a button. The questions are answered in your own browser and the summary is worked out on your own machine; nothing is transmitted while you are filling it in. Your answers are kept in this browser so you can leave and come back, and they are put in the address bar so you can send the link to a business partner to finish — which means anybody you send that link to can see the answers, and that is worth knowing before you send it.
If you choose to send the summary at the end, what leaves your browser is: your answers, the two or three areas they pointed at, and the name, business, e-mail and telephone number you typed. It is written to a file on the server and e-mailed to the office, and if you tick the box it is also e-mailed to you.
What is kept, and for how long
This is a demonstration website. This is a demonstration website. Woodside Management Partners is not a real firm, no enquiry sent from this site reaches anybody, and the telephone number is a placeholder. It was built to show what a small professional firm gets for a fixed price.
$2,200 a partner day · ninety minutes free · about one in four we talk out of it
Twelve questions, about four minutes, and a summary you can disagree with. It is indicative and not professional advice, and it says so on every screen.