Business Risk Scorecard

Where is your business most exposed?

This 20-question scorecard assesses your resilience across five dimensions of risk, financial, operational, compliance, market and people, and shows you exactly where to shore up first.

~5 minutes · 20 questions · No login to start

Financial

Operational

Compliance & Legal

Market & Strategic

People & Culture

About 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.

What you’ll see

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

The short answers are here. For anything else, ask below or get in touch.

Five dimensions, with four questions in each. Financial covers cash runway, revenue concentration, forecasting discipline and leverage. Operational covers what happens if you step away, how well processes are documented, backup for critical roles, and how current your technology is. Compliance and legal covers insurance reviews, employment contracts and HR policies, tax confidence, and data-protection procedures. Market and strategic covers differentiation, revenue diversity, online reputation, and whether you have a documented plan. People and culture covers turnover, engagement, succession, and recruitment. It is a breadth check across the whole business, not a deep audit of any single area.

No. It is general information designed to help you see where to focus, not personal, financial or legal advice. The scores come entirely from your own answers on a five-point scale — the tool does not check your figures against current ATO, Fair Work or other official thresholds, and it cannot confirm whether you are actually compliant. Use a low score in any category as a signal to look closer, ideally with your accountant, bookkeeper, lawyer or adviser, rather than as a definitive rating.

Because in most smaller Australian businesses it is the single largest hidden risk. Questions about whether the business would continue if you were out for three months, how well your processes are documented, whether critical roles have backup, and whether you have a succession plan all test the same underlying vulnerability: how much of the business depends on one or two irreplaceable people. When that dependency is high, an illness, a resignation or even a holiday can stall the whole operation — which is why the scorecard surfaces it across both the operational and people dimensions.

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Talk your results through with an advisor.

Use these results to make better decisions. If you'd like a second pair of eyes on them, an advisor can walk through what they mean for the business.