You are struggling to find enough work. Your business model isn’t working for you as you’d like. You’re not sure you have the right service/products, marketing and sales for the right market. You get ad hoc business and rarely achieve profit as a result of your efforts which means your personal finances suffer as a result.

You’re surviving financially but you recognise there are possibilities to increase how lucrative your business is but as you have little sight of the key numbers in your business, you’re not sure where specifically. You’re too busy maintaining the status quo to be able to research and pursue opportunities that will improve your profit.

You know what is required to run a profitable business and are successfully selling and delivering your services/products to a receptive market. You achieve consistent revenues and profits, have good sight of your financials, are happy with your financial performance and the business is adequately funding a comfortable lifestyle.

You are prepared to think “outside the box” to stretch the boundaries of the possible monetary reward and are prepared to try new things to achieve this. You are proactively seeking to measure and increase your return by always exploring opportunities for improvement and new strategies to make the business more lucrative.

You accept that long winded and laborious tasks are part and parcel of what you do and there is no way to overcome them. You find yourself investing a lot of time and effort but not feeling productive as a result.

You know that more automation, streamlining processes, training and focusing the right talent on the right jobs will help you grow the business, but it’s too long term and you need to focus on getting things done right now.

You recognise the importance of introducing relevant technologies and the right talent to streamline delivery and increase profitability so create plans to do so and seek to implement this wherever time and resources permit. Your operations and team are reasonably efficient and effective as a result.

You see the business and all its parts as an operating machine, striving to achieve maximum productivity with minimum wasted effort or expense. You continuously seek to increase efficiency in all areas, even though it’s already profitable. You recognise that this allows you and your staff to focus on the important tasks and lays the foundations for scalability.

You are unclear as to the true value your products and/or services provide to your customers and have not started to think about how you might improve them. Your delivery already takes up all of your time and money as it is and if you tried to improve what you’re doing you’re sure you would just erode your already slender profit margins.

You have done some customer research and have some idea of how you could improve the value of your services/products for them and have implemented one or two. You are unclear as to the impact they have had on your customers’ impressions of you. You would like to find out and do more to deliver more value but the constraints of time and finance are making this challenging.

You pay attention to value for money in your delivery. You research client opinion and implement changes to improve the customer experience on a sporadic basis. You know your customers receive good value for money in relation to the market and they are satisfied with the level of service you provide.

You are continuously seeking feedback and looking for ways to deliver more and more value to your customers and wow them with their experience of your business. You recognise that this is vital to your ongoing success as it enables you to consistently exceed expectations, building an ever growing and more loyal fan base that will drive the growing reputation of your business and subsequently lead to ever more customers.

You are unclear on what your values are and the importance of them in achieving personal and business success. Or over time you have given up on your values as business is challenging enough and sometimes you do whatever is necessary to protect your business.

You may be experiencing difficulties as a result such as personal stress, poor retention of staff and customers.

You have some sense of what your business values are and you strive to deliver to your own personal value set, however you believe it is not always possible - sometimes you have to compromise and although you don’t feel good about it, it’s not really harming anyone.

You know what your values are. You recognise the importance of staying true to your own and your business values. You do your best to make sure you abide by them in all dealings with others and that you bare them in mind when you make your decisions and you and your company benefit as a result.

You put your business values at the centre of your business and all your business relationships. In particular you use them to help attract and retain quality talent and the sort of customers you want to work for. You recognise that they are key in driving the consistency and authenticity of the customer experience from marketing and sales through to service delivery which will all underpin continuing growth.

You find yourself in a position in the business where you don’t have the freedom to choose to do what you want to do. You accept that in order to keep your business running you will just have to do things you don’t like. It’s not enjoyable but you get your head down and focus on making money.

You enjoy some of what you do, but most are not your preferred tasks. You can see that with more resources you could focus on the work you find more inspiring. You have ideas on how to change it but in the short-term you think this is the price you have to pay to keep going. You feel somewhat stuck and unable to make significant changes.

You derive satisfaction from your business in terms of what you are doing day to day and what and how it delivers. You and your staff/team are happy enough which gives you a general sense of wellbeing but you recognise you can’t always enjoy yourself and that not everyone is able to play to their strengths all the time.

You consistently strive to orchestrate your role and that of your team to free yourself and your staff/team up to focus on what you/they love doing in the business and what you/they are best at. You recognise that this will enable top performance and maximum satisfaction from everyone which will drive the business forward.

Your business is not fulfilling any of the lifestyle, personal success and career ambitions you had hoped. As a result you’ve lost sight of your dreams. Work/life balance seems like an impossibility.

You’ve made some small progress towards achieving your lifestyle, personal success and career ambitions, but they often get swallowed up by maintaining and running the business as it stands. Work/life balance is on your radar but is an occasional luxury right now.

Your business provides you with enough freedom, time, income and facility with which to live comfortably. You’ve fulfilled an adequate level of personal and career ambitions and you can see that you will get to achieve many more of your goals still. You are able to have a good level of work/life balance consistently.

You’ve fulfilled a huge proportion (if not all) of your career and personal ambitions and live the lifestyle you’ve always wanted to. You have the freedom to continue to set new objectives and pursue activities that provide you with the maximum fulfillment you desire.