Twenty questions · six to seven minutes

The Readiness Scorecard

Where your business sits on the curve is what you get if the ending arrives tomorrow. Readiness is not a project you start at least two years out. It is a state you hold.

Four scores out of 25. No total and no average, ever.
Ends with the one pillar worth working on this quarter.

Four states, four steps. The dashed line does not wait for you to be ready.

Start the twenty questions → Do The Value Gap Check instead →

The Readiness Curve™

Four states. One of them is yours today.

Boxed

Trapped

The business is you. Every significant relationship is with you personally, nothing is written down and if you stopped for 90 days it would stop with you.

Roped

Tethered

Some systems exist. Operations hold up but growth, the key relationships and every judgement call still route back through you.

Handable

Transferable

It could change hands, or you could step back to a chair role and the value would not walk out with you.

Choose

Optional

You do not have to hand it over. You have a date, the people around you know it and staying is a decision rather than a default.

Four states along the curve, three pillars that decide which one you are in and the will that decides whether you ever move. You are placed where the business actually is, not where you intend to be.

Answer honestly. Nobody is watching.

Twenty questions, in four sections.

Every question runs one to five, with a written description at each end.

0 of 20 answered Section 1 · Business Readiness

One question at a time. Press 1 to 5 to answer, or Enter to move on. Your answers stay on this device and nothing is sent anywhere until you ask for it.

Your placement

Here is where the business actually sits.

Three things decide whether you have real options: whether the business works without you, whether the numbers stand up and whether you are personally ready.

A fourth decides whether any of it produces an ending. That one is the Will, scored on its own.

The lowest pillar governs. Never the average, never a total.

Your state on The Readiness Curve™

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Where you stand is what you get. A dashed line crosses the curve: the exit event. Death, disability, divorce, disagreement, distress, or an unsolicited offer too good to refuse. It arrives on its own schedule and wherever it falls is what you get.

Your governing constraint

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Your Will read

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Start with this

You have just done Step 1, Place. Step 2 decides what this quarter is for.

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The reading is the useful bit.

The four scores above are yours already. One email unlocks what they add up to: your state on The Readiness Curve™, the pillar that governs, your Will read and the step to start on.

Your name

Your best email

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"Every adviser around you is paid on the year before or the year after, so the ending itself is nobody's deliverable. It stays yours."Kerry Boulton · The Exit Strategy Group

Readiness without the will to decide is the most respectable way ever invented to never decide. You are always almost there.

Kerry Boulton is an Accredited Family Business Advisor, Certified Value Builder Advisor and Certified Exit Planning Advisor.

What people usually do next

The session that goes with this result.

The Sellable Business Advantage

The monthly session that moves an owner from problem aware to solution aware. What actually gets discounted when the ending arrives, why it is almost never the revenue and the three scales your own ending has to be designed on.

Watch the session →

Do The Value Gap Check as well

The other half of Step 3: the distance between today and the number you need.

Check the gap →

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Check the working

How this places you

The scoring rule, in full

Five questions per pillar, equal weight. Each scores one to five.
The bands. Fragile 5 to 11, Building 12 to 18, Ready 19 to 25. The Will runs Drifting, Circling, Committed.
The lowest pillar governs. Never the average, never a total. If two tie, Personal governs, then Financial.
The state follows the governing pillar. Only a Committed Will lifts you to Optional.
The five Will questions are behavioural. They ask what has already happened. A starting point, not a diagnosis.

Every written anchor and all twenty questions are Kerry’s own, from The Readiness Scorecard. What this page adds is the arithmetic around them: the three bands, the tie rule and the mapping from the governing pillar onto The Readiness Curve™.

The four scores are shown to you the moment the last question is answered. The reading that goes with them, your state, the pillar that governs, the Will read and the step to start on, sits behind one email.

Nothing here is a valuation and nothing here has looked at your accounts. It is twenty of your own answers, added up in four columns. Treat it as a starting point for a conversation, which is exactly what it was built to be.

Your answers stay in this browser until you ask for the reading. When you do, your name, your email and your four scores go to The Exit Strategy Group so the result can be sent to you. Nothing else is collected and nothing is passed on.

Always be ready.
Kerry Boulton, The Exit Strategy Group