Pick the question you are actually asking.
Four free tools, each built around one calculation business owners get wrong. They run entirely in your browser, none of them asks for an email before showing you an answer, and every one of them can be printed or saved as a PDF when you are done.
Wheel of Business
Score nine areas of your business out of ten. You get a total out of 90, how many areas sit below your own average, and the lowest one with the first thing to do about it. It is a self-assessment, so it is exactly as good as your honesty.
Open the scorecardOwner Time Audit
Log last week in five categories. You get your effective hourly rate, the hours a week someone else could be doing, and what those hours cost at your own rate. It will not tell you the difference is free money — it says on the page why it is not.
Open the time auditProfit Improvement Calculator
Move five levers — leads, conversion, average sale, purchase frequency and margin — and see what each is worth on its own and what all five are worth together. Illustrative arithmetic, not a forecast, and it says so.
Open the calculatorTrue Cost of a Hire
Adds employer National Insurance and the pension minimum at 2026/27 rates, then your own figures for kit, recruitment and ramp-up — and the revenue the role has to cover at your gross margin. Statutory rates are linked to GOV.UK.
Open the calculatorThey are the four calculations owners get wrong.
Every one came out of the same conversation happening in coaching sessions with different owners and roughly identical arithmetic.
“I know what the problem is.”
Usually not. The Wheel of Business runs the nine areas of the Wheel of Business and reliably points somewhere other than where the owner was looking. More leads is the most common wrong answer to a conversion, pricing or delivery problem.
“I do not have the time.”
The owner time audit asks where fifty hours went and puts your own effective hourly rate against each block. The number that lands is rarely the total. It is how few of those hours were work only you could do.
“We need a big push on sales.”
The profit improvement calculator shows what a five per cent move on each of the five levers does, and how much more leads alone would have to rise to match it. The compounding is the whole point.
“Can I afford someone at thirty grand?”
Wrong question, twice over. The true cost of a hire calculator adds employer National Insurance, the pension minimum, kit, recruitment and ramp-up, then tells you the revenue the role has to cover at your margin.
How do the four fit together?
They are in the order a coaching conversation usually runs. The scorecard finds where the business is constrained, because owners are consistently wrong about that and it is a cheap mistake to correct. The time audit explains why the constrained area is not getting fixed, which is almost always that the owner’s week has no room in it. The profit calculator sizes the prize, so the effort goes at the lever worth the most for the least. The hiring calculator is the one that stops a good decision being made on a wrong number.
You do not have to run all four, and there is no sequence being enforced. If you already know the answer to the first question, skip to the tool that matches the decision in front of you.
What happens to the numbers you type?
Nothing leaves your browser. There is no database behind any of these pages and no score, salary or set of hours is stored anywhere. The calculations run in JavaScript on your own device, which is also why every tool works instantly as you type rather than after a submit button.
Under each tool there is an optional email box, and it sits after the answer rather than in front of it. If you use it, what gets sent is your email address, your first name if you gave one, and a short summary of your own result — so the follow-up is about your numbers rather than a generic newsletter. You can also print any result or save it as a PDF straight from the result panel without giving an address at all.
What should you do with the answer?
Pick one thing and put a date on it. Every one of these tools is built to produce a single starting point rather than a list, because a list of nine improvements produces no improvements. The scorecard names one area. The time audit names one block of hours. The profit calculator names one lever. The hiring calculator gives you one monthly number to test the decision against.
Then work out whether the change is one you can make on your own. Some are: writing down this quarter’s three priorities, or counting last quarter’s quotes, are jobs for a quiet Friday afternoon. Others — a price rise, a first hire, handing over work you have always done yourself — are the ones owners tend to circle for months. That is what coaching is for, and the first conversation is free.
The guides behind the tools
Each tool has a written guide sitting behind it, and the guides carry the judgement the arithmetic cannot. Understanding your numbers covers the six financial figures that actually matter and how to read them without being an accountant. Price for profit works through what a price move does to profit and how many clients you could lose and still be better off. When to hire and who to hire first covers the decision the hiring calculator only costs. All of them, and the rest of the library, are in Resources.
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Frequently asked questions
Do I have to give an email address?
No. Every tool gives you the full answer, the working and the recommendation on the page, with no email and no account. There is an optional box under each one if you want the longer write-up sent to you, and that is the only point at which an address is captured. Gating a calculator behind a form is a decision to collect more addresses and help fewer people, and it makes the page worth less to everyone including us.
Where do the tax figures come from?
Only the true cost of a hire calculator uses statutory figures, and both are 2026/27, applying from 6 April 2026: employer National Insurance at 15 per cent above a £5,000 secondary threshold, and the automatic enrolment employer minimum of 3 per cent of qualifying earnings between £6,240 and £50,270. Both are linked to the GOV.UK page they came from on the tool itself. Nothing else on these pages is a rate, a threshold or a statistic — the other three tools work entirely on the numbers you type in.
Are the results a forecast?
No, and the tools say so where it matters. The profit calculator in particular is illustrative arithmetic: it models how five variables interact, holds fixed overheads still and takes no view on cash or capacity. It is useful for working out which lever deserves your attention and why five small moves beat one large one. It is not useful as a number to put in a budget, and anyone presenting a calculator output as a forecast is selling you something.
Is anything I type stored?
No. All four run entirely in your browser, and there is no database behind any of these pages. Nothing is sent anywhere unless you deliberately fill in the optional email box, in which case what is sent is your email address, your first name if you gave it, and a short summary of your own result so the follow-up is about your numbers rather than generic. You can print or save any result as a PDF from the result panel without giving an address at all.
Can I use these with my team, or with clients?
Yes, and the scorecard in particular works better with more than one person filling it in. Give the nine areas to two or three people who see the business from the inside, have them score independently and compare where you are more than two points apart. If you are an adviser and want to use these with your own clients, that is fine too — a link back to the page is appreciated rather than required.
What does coaching cost?
There are no prices published anywhere on this site, and that is deliberate rather than coy: the programmes are not equivalent amounts of work, so a single headline number would be misleading for most people reading it. You get a specific figure on the 30-minute discovery call, before committing to anything. If the fee would be genuinely tight for the business right now, say so on the call — being told to fix something else first and come back next quarter is a real outcome, not a negotiating position.
