The rules behind the Owner's Audit, written down so you can check them. They are fixed and the same for every owner. If they change, this page and its date change.
What is asked
- Free audit (stage 1): three questions about the life you want, six numbers, the five things that stop when you are away, 20 of the 69 questions about the business, your first step, and where you are with it. About 12 minutes.
- Full audit (at enrolment in the program): the remaining 49 questions, chosen by your direction (sell, keep, grow), plus a section on your current system. The same questions are asked again at day 85.
- Each business question has four answers, best to worst, stored as 0, 1, 2 or 3. The order on screen changes from question to question, so the "good" answer is not always on top. Some questions allow "does not apply" and are left out of the calculation.
- For a one-person business, 15 questions have their own wording and some are left out.
The layers
Every question belongs to one layer. The layers are a ladder: direction, processes, information and numbers, roles and handover, automation. Under all of them runs a safety floor, and around all of them the improvement loop.
| Rule | How |
|---|---|
| Layer score | 100 × (1 − mean answer / 3) over the questions that apply. Broken below 40, Weak below 60, Holding below 80, Strong at 80 and above. |
| Keystone floor | Eight questions are keystones (for example: what happens if you disappear for 30 days; whether there is a plan for illness). If one of them has the worst answer, its layer is capped at Weak whatever the mean, and the question is named. The mean cannot hide one catastrophic answer. |
| What comes first | The lowest rung that is Broken or Weak; if none, the lowest that is Holding. Direction is always the first page, whatever its score, because it decides which processes are worth building. |
| In the free audit | Layers are scored from the 20 stage-1 questions, not all 69. Automation is not measured. The read-out says so. |
The levers
Eight levers group the questions by the move that fixes them (make it safe, write it down, count what matters, hand it over, make it pay, step out of small decisions, demand that does not need you, choose the direction). Lever pressure = 100 × mean of its answers / 3. A lever is in play if it has one answer at the worst, or two at the second worst. The three with the highest pressure are shown, by tier and then by pressure. In the program, four at most, with what each needs first.
The six numbers and the contradictions
Six numbers are asked before any opinion question: days without you, hours last week, share of the biggest customer, revenue that repeats, months of cash, people who can price a job. They are not scored. They are shown beside the scores, and again at day 85. When a number and an answer do not agree (for example "runs 30 days without me" and 12 days as the number), the read-out says so, with two possible readings and a one-week test. It never decides which one is true.
What we do not do
- We do not compare your scores with other owners' until there are at least 20 records, and never below 20 in a segment.
- We do not put a value on your business or a percentage on what you "lose". There is no serious source for those figures and we do not invent them.
- We build nothing from what we privately know about you. Only from what you answered.
What is AI and what is not
- Not AI: the scores, the layers, the first layer, the levers, the contradictions and the text of the free read-out. They are fixed rules that run on your device. No person reads the free read-out.
- AI, and labelled: the wording of the program's full report is drafted by an AI model from your answers and our method, under a client number, not your name. A person reads and corrects every report before it reaches you. Spanish reports are reviewed in their English version; the Spanish is a translation.
Sources
The question-behaviour effect: Wood, Conner and colleagues, "The impact of asking intention or self-prediction questions on subsequent behavior: a meta-analysis", Personality and Social Psychology Review, 2016. A small but reliable effect; we say so and leave it there.
Rules version: question bank v2, layers v2, levers v2, numbers v1, contradictions v1 (4 November 2026). Page dated 5 November 2026.