Where is your business most exposed?

About this tool

Business Risk Scorecard

Most owners carry a rough sense of where their business is fragile, but it lives in their head, unmeasured and rarely compared side by side. One exposure feels urgent because it flared up last month; another that could genuinely sink the business sits quietly unexamined. The Business Risk Scorecard turns that scattered instinct into a structured read. It is a short self-assessment that looks across five dimensions of business risk — financial, operational, compliance and legal, market and strategic, and people and culture — and shows you, in one view, where your business is most exposed and where it is already resilient. It is built for Australian SMEs and framed for the realities of running a smaller operation, where the same few people hold most of the knowledge and there is little slack to absorb a shock.

How it works

You answer twenty questions, four in each of the five risk dimensions, choosing the option on a five-point scale that best matches your business today. The questions probe practical resilience rather than abstractions: how many months of expenses you could cover if revenue stopped, whether the business would keep running if you were out for three months, how well your key processes are documented, whether employment contracts and privacy procedures are current, how concentrated your revenue is, and whether you have succession cover for critical roles. Each answer scores from lowest to highest resilience, and the tool averages your answers within each dimension and across the whole set to produce category scores and an overall score out of a hundred, where a higher score means safer. It then bands you into a risk level, plots each category on an exposure matrix so higher-risk areas sit toward the top-right, names your three most exposed categories, and lists priority moves to address them first. The scoring reflects your own inputs — it does not pull in live regulatory thresholds or dollar figures — so treat it as a structured prompt for where to look, not a compliance verdict.

Who it’s for

Owners and managers of Australian small and medium businesses who want a fast, structured read on where their business is most exposed and which risk to tackle first.

• Assesses resilience across five dimensions — financial, operational, compliance and legal, market and strategic, and people and culture — so no major category of risk gets overlooked.
• Produces an overall score, per-category scores, and an exposure matrix that ranks your weakest areas, turning a vague sense of vulnerability into a prioritised list.
• Focuses on the fragilities common to smaller businesses — founder dependency, thin process documentation, revenue concentration, and gaps in succession cover — rather than generic corporate frameworks.

Frequently asked questions