How the score is calculated.How the score is calculated.

What it measures

The assessment scores five dimensions. Each is made up of questions about how your business actually operates day to day — not about your revenue, your goals, or your intentions.

• Job Costing — How precisely you know what each job actually costs you. (6 questions)
• Operations — How consistently work runs without the owner in the middle of it. (6 questions)
• Purchasing — The leverage you carry with suppliers and vendors. (5 questions)
• Technology — Whether your systems give you numbers you can act on. (6 questions)
• Growth — How ready the business is for its next stage. (6 questions)

How answers are scored

Every question offers five choices, scored 0 through 4, where 0 describes the least mature practice and 4 the most. Those raw values are normalised to a 0–100 scale.

A handful of questions carry a weight of 1.5 rather than 1. These are the diagnostics that most reliably separate profitable contractors from struggling ones — for example, whether you know a job’s true cost while it is still running. Everything else is weighted equally.

Each dimension score is the weighted mean of its answered questions. Your overall score is the weighted mean across every answered question, so dimensions with more questions carry proportionally more of the total. Unanswered questions are excluded rather than counted as zero.

Score bands

• At Risk (0–39) — There are gaps here that are almost certainly costing you money every month. The good news: these are the fastest areas to improve.
• Developing (40–59) — The fundamentals are partly in place but inconsistent. Most contractors in this range are leaving real margin on the table.
• Solid (60–79) — You're running ahead of most independent contractors. The opportunity now is leverage — doing more with the foundation you've built.
• Strong (80–100) — You're operating at a high level. At this point growth usually comes from scale and network access rather than internal fixes.

How findings are read from your answers

The score is a summary. The findings underneath it are not — they come from the individual answers rather than from the totals, so two businesses on the same overall score get different reports. Every finding on your report shows the question and the answer it was read from, and nothing is asserted that you didn’t say.

Some findings come from a single answer. Costing labor at raw wages, for instance, is worth naming on its own whatever else you scored. Others come from two answers in different sections disagreeing with each other — strong growth readiness sitting on weak cost visibility is a different problem from either one alone, and it’s flagged as its own finding.

How your action plan is ordered

Each area puts forward one recommended action, chosen by the score you got in it: a business at 20 on job costing and one at 70 need different advice, not the same advice more urgently. Where a single answer is serious enough — no backups, change orders on a handshake — that answer overrides the score and sets the action for its area.

Actions are then ranked by the size of the gap plus the weight of what your answers flagged, so an area scoring in the middle with two serious findings can outrank a lower score with none. Every action leads with an operational change you could make on your own, then names the Paving Alliance or Job Cost Portal resource relevant to it. The order is deliberate: if the fix doesn’t matter to you, the resource shouldn’t either.

What this is not

This is a structured self-assessment, not an audit. It reflects what you tell it. It does not value your business, predict profitability, or substitute for advice from your accountant or attorney. Its purpose is narrower and more useful: to show you which part of the operation is most likely costing you money right now.

Nothing about the report is generated on the fly or randomised. The same answers always produce the same score, the same findings and the same plan — so you can retake it in six months and the difference means something.

What happens to your answers

Scoring runs entirely in your browser. Your answers are saved to this device’s local storage so you can close the tab and come back, and they are not transmitted to Paving Alliance unless you separately choose to contact us. Clearing your browser data removes them.