The self-scored diagnostic · Six factors · Six minutes

Is your business Battle Ready™?

Not "is it profitable." Not "is it growing." Battle Ready. Can it absorb the shock of an acquisition, a leadership change, a market compression, a founder absence, and continue delivering under new ownership without losing what made it work?

A second question, harder than the first: How do you play a game you don't even know exists? Sophisticated capital is pricing your business against a scoring instrument most founders have never seen. This is that instrument, honest and self-scored.
Score your business Read Process You
The Battle-Ready Index™ · Self-scored

Six factors. Score each 1 to 5. Be honest.

The instrument itself is called the Battle-Ready Index™ (BRI). Six factors, weighted composite, scored zero to one hundred. This is the short-form self-assessment. The full diagnostic runs as a facilitated Consensus Assessment with your senior team, but this version will tell you within a point or two where you stand.

B
Factor 01 · 20% weight

Bench

If you were unreachable for 90 days, could the leadership team keep the business running at the same level of decision quality without you?

Not at all
Poorly
Partially
Mostly
Yes, fully
A
Factor 02 · 20% weight

Architecture

Are your operating systems, governance, decision rights, and financial reporting cadence documented, taught, and enforced, rather than living in the memory of two or three people?

Tribal
Partial
Some docs
Codified
Institutional
T
Factor 03 · 15% weight

Transferability

Are your customer relationships, IP, and operational knowledge owned by the business as a legal and practical matter, or do they live in individuals?

In heads
Some in files
Half & half
Mostly owned
Fully owned
T
Factor 04 · 10% weight

Tempo

Do you close the books monthly on a defined cadence, forecast with reasonable accuracy, and hold your team to a rhythm a buyer could plug into on day one?

Reactive
Inconsistent
Improving
Rhythmic
Metronome
L
Factor 05 · 20% weight

Loyalty

If your business were acquired tomorrow, how much of your leadership team, key employees, and top customers would still be here twelve months later?

Few
Some
About half
Most
Nearly all
E
Factor 06 · 15% weight

Endurance

Has your business been genuinely pressure-tested (a downturn, a key-person loss, a customer concentration event, an ownership change) and continued to deliver?

Untested
Wobbled
Recovered
Held
Battle-tested
Your self-scored result

Where you stand on the Battle-Ready Index™.

0/100
Your band
Untested
Answer the six questions and reveal your score.
A note on this score This is a self-scored short-form. The real Battle-Ready Index runs as a facilitated Consensus Assessment with your senior team, then verifies the answers against evidence (documentation, artifacts, actual retention data). Your self-scored number is typically five to fifteen points higher than the facilitated number. This is not a failure of the instrument. It is a feature: convergence in the room is itself a Bench signal.

The Battle-Ready bands

0–40
Vulnerable
41–54
Exposed
55–69
Tested
70–84
Hardened
85+
Battle Ready
What every self-score has in common Whatever your number is, you are now playing the unseen game rather than being played by it. That is the first meaningful move. The rest is architecture.
The unseen game

You are already in the game.

You do not have to play the unseen game. But you also do not get to opt out of it. Sophisticated capital is pricing the substrate whether you know the rules or not. The choice is not whether to be in the game. The choice is whether to see it.

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