Resources
Business Readiness Checklist
Use this before your Neutrino assessment — or on your own — to spot where time and money leak out of the business.
The seven checks
Use these steps to spot where work is getting stuck before you invest in new software or hire another consultant. Each item maps to a bottleneck we see repeatedly in Australian SMB assessments.
- List every tool your team uses weekly — highlight duplicates and manual exports.
- Track one recurring task: how many people touch it, and how long it takes end-to-end.
- Note where customers wait on you (quotes, callbacks, status updates).
- Identify one report someone rebuilds manually every week.
- Ask: if this broke tomorrow, would anyone notice within an hour?
- Score each problem area: impact (revenue/time) vs. effort to fix.
- Book a 45-minute external perspective before committing to a big software purchase.
How to run it properly
Run it over a week, not an hour
Readiness problems show up in the gaps between days — the enquiry that waited overnight, the job that stalled because the only person who knew the pricing was on site. A one-hour workshop surfaces the problems everyone already talks about, which are rarely the expensive ones.
Ask the person doing the work
Owners consistently describe a process as designed rather than as performed, and the difference between those two is where most of the lost hours live. Failed automation projects almost always skipped this conversation.
Put a number next to every item
Two staff spending three hours a week reconciling duplicate entries is six hours at a loaded rate — often $300 to $600 a week before you count the errors a customer notices. Rough numbers beat gut feel when you are deciding what to fix first.
What to do with the results
Rank by frequency, cost and fixability
Score each item you flagged on how often it happens, how much it costs when it does, and whether a clear fix exists. Start with high frequency, high cost and fixable. Spreading effort across everything you found is the most common way this exercise produces nothing.
Separate people problems from system problems
Training fixes one-off mistakes. Recurring weekly pain regardless of who is on shift is structural. Automating a structural problem works; automating a training problem encodes the mistake.
Expect the top item to surprise you
In most Australian SMB assessments the largest recoverable cost is not the process everyone complains about. It is a quiet handoff nobody mentions because it has always worked that way — like the overnight wait between an enquiry arriving and someone reading it.
Estimate what the stuck work is costing you
What is the stuck work costing you?
Rough annual cost of manual admin and workarounds — before any build investment.
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