Business Health Scorecard

Business owners check the revenue line and assume the rest is fine. The rest is rarely fine. A business can be growing top-line while silently dying from margin erosion, customer concentration, or a churn rate that's already eating the next quarter. This skill scores five groups — revenue, profitability, cash, growth engine, operations — against benchmarks tuned to the stage you're actually at, not the stage a generic blog post assumes.

The traffic lights mean what they say. GREEN is at or above benchmark. AMBER means below benchmark or trending wrong. RED means crisis territory. GREY is honest — it flags the data you don't have rather than fabricating a score. A scorecard built on three real numbers and two blind spots is more useful than a confident-looking grid built on assumed values.

Benchmarks adjust by stage. Pre-revenue, early ($0-$500K ARR), growth ($500K-$5M), scale ($5M+), agency, e-commerce, and solo all have different healthy ranges. A 50% gross margin is fine at early-stage SaaS and a problem at scale. The skill picks the right benchmark set automatically from the data you give it, and if your business straddles two stages it uses the more conservative one — which is usually the finding itself.

The real value is the dangerous combinations check. Eight patterns get screened: growing but dying (revenue up, margin down, burn up), leaky bucket (acquisition up, churn up), sugar high (one big client inflating the numbers), efficiency trap (revenue per employee up, NPS down), cash crunch incoming (revenue up, receivables aging, cash declining), zombie growth, talent death spiral, and the vanity-metrics mask. Individual scores can all read GREEN while two of them combine into a six-month problem.

You get the scorecard, the diagnosis of which combinations are firing, a priority action list capped at five items (more than five and nothing happens), 90-day targets with specific numbers to hit, and an explicit list of blind spots. RED items are stated directly — "your cash runway is four months at current burn" — because softening critical findings is how owners learn to ignore the report. This is for your own business; the agency-side equivalent for tracking client health lives in a separate skill.