Small Business Operating Decision Assessment for Shop, Service and Studio OwnersThe busiest month you ever had was the one that lost money.

Methodology: Forty original exercises across six formats: sixteen owner dilemmas with four graded moves, of which five are one bakery's trading year delivered as a fixed-state cascade; seven judgement-of-figures questions with one keyed answer; six select-every-that-applies exercises; five true-or-false claims; three ordering exercises; and three estimates on a slider for the margin and runway arithmetic owners actually do. Construct statement: this instrument measures operating judgement in a business of two to fifteen people, as written, in one sitting: how a person prices after a cost rise and tells who first, extends credit, buys and holds stock, carries a quiet month and a large order, takes on and manages the people on the payroll including a relative, answers a public complaint, and decides what to stop doing and when to take money out. It does not measure the respondent's product, their market, their luck, their accounting knowledge, their character or their prospects, and it is not financial, tax, legal or employment advice. Declared response instruction: knowledge, one instruction for the whole instrument. Every exercise asks what the best move is for the business and the person running it, never what the respondent would do. Scoring design: C8, path-value trajectory with recovery credit. The five cascade rungs describe one year and each rung states the position reached, which is the same for every respondent because a fixed item bank cannot branch; the report says so in plain words so that no rung is read as a consequence of an earlier answer. Each option carries an authored value from zero to three. The node score is the chosen value less the worst available, divided by the best available less the worst, so the best move from a bad position scores one at that rung and an early error is never counted five times. Every rung contains a full-credit move. Rung weights are 1, 1, 1.2, 1.3 and 1.5, later rungs weighing at least as much as earlier ones. The eleven standalone dilemmas are scored on the same node rule at unit weight. Judgement-of-figures questions and claims score one or zero; select-all exercises score the F1 overlap between the chosen set and the keyed set; ordering exercises score the share of positions placed correctly; estimates score the platform's banded partial credit by distance from the keyed value. The null: every exercise declares an empirical marginal, authored per option, per selection, per position or per estimate value, giving the share of ordinary respondents expected to choose each. The composite and each part are the weighted mean of answered exercises' scores set against the weighted mean of the score a respondent answering at those marginals would earn on the same exercises, so zero means no better than the way people typically answer, and one hundred is the best available move everywhere. The per-position mean option value across the cascade was flattened at authoring and is printed in the seed, because five rungs is a small enough set for one option position to carry the answer. Three fixed habits, always the cautious move, always the growth move and always the first option, were pushed through the real builder and none beats a typical respondent; their prices are printed on the report. Refusal rules: an unanswered exercise leaves the numerator, the denominator and the chance term together and never scores zero; an empty sitting scores exactly zero; a sitting with fewer than twenty-two exercises answered is refused a headline and the refusal is printed where the figure would have been; a part with fewer than eight answered exercises, or an assumed omega under .70 taken unrounded, carries a three-way placement and no number; the cascade, at five rungs, carries a placement and its trail and never a figure of its own; no percentile appears anywhere because there is no norm group yet. Omega is McDonald's omega estimated from item count and an assumed inter-item correlation of .26, an assumption stated in the open that observed data will replace; the assumed score standard deviation is 24 on the corrected scale. Every reported figure carries its 68 and 95 per cent bands. Over-committing moves and over-cautious moves on the dilemmas are counted apart and never netted. Fairness: no exercise relies on any one country's tax, employment, licensing or consumer law; where a rule matters it is stated in the exercise in one sentence. Amounts are plain numbers in whatever currency the reader trades in. People are described by role, never by sex, community or family stereotype; a relative on the payroll is a relative. No exercise keys personal borrowing, unpaid family labour or working through illness as the answer; where money pressure is the situation, the keyed move protects the business and the person. Sources drawn on: Marn and Rosiello (1992) on the price lever and the arithmetic of a cost rise; Anderson and Simester (2004) on the long-run effects of promotion depth and what discounting teaches customers; Kahneman, Knetsch and Thaler (1986) on what customers judge as fair in a price rise; Kaplan and Cooper (1998) on profitability by product line and the busy month that loses money; Wilson and Summers (2002) and Peel, Wilson and Howorth (2000) on trade credit and late payment in small firms; Ekanem (2010) on liquidity management in small firms; Mullins (2014) on customer-funded growth, deposits and terms; Lovallo and Kahneman (2003) on optimism and the large order; Churchill and Lewis (1983) on the stages of small business growth and the owner separating from the business; Skinner (1974) and Goldratt (1984) on focus and the constraint, for what to stop doing; Coad, Nielsen and Timmermans (2017) on what the first employee changes; Lansberg (1983) and Tagiuri and Davis (1996) on relatives on the payroll and institutional overlap in family firms; Proserpio and Zervas (2017) and Chevalier and Mayzlin (2006) on public replies to online reviews and word of mouth; Homburg and Fürst (2005) on complaint handling and procedural fairness; Cardon and Patel (2015) and Stephan (2018) on the owner's health and stress as a cost of the business; McDaniel, Hartman, Whetzel and Grubb (2007) on situational judgement scoring; and Haladyna, Downing and Rodriguez (2002) for the item-writing rules. All exercises are original works written for this instrument. No real business, bank, lender, review platform, accounting product, tax authority or country's law is named or relied on anywhere. This instrument is not affiliated with, endorsed by or derived from any commercial instrument, lender, incubator programme or professional body.