How to Run a 15-Minute Readiness Audit on Your Operation
If you’ve ever been in roastery or small manufacturing site for any length of time, you’ve probably had at least one "oh no" day.
The machine that always works… doesn’t.
The person who always shows up… can’t.
The supplier who’s "never late"… is very late.
On those days you suddenly realize how much of your operation lives in people’s heads, and how little lives in simple, shared systems.
Most teams only find out how fragile they are while something is breaking. That’s a rough time to learn.
You don’t need a month-long consulting project to get a clearer picture. You just need a short, honest look.
In this post, I’ll walk you through a 15-minute readiness audit you can run with your team. It’s very close to how I start when I sit down with clients at CNRY Group.
You won’t fix everything in 15 minutes. But you will see where you’re strong, where you’re exposed, and where a few small moves could save you a lot of stress (and money) later.
Step 1 – Pick one realistic "bad day" scenario
Let’s not start with asteroids or once-in-a-century events.
Pick something that’s uncomfortable but genuinely possible for your business. For example:
Your main roaster or production line is offline for 3–5 days
Your key operator or production manager is suddenly out for a week
A critical supplier can’t deliver what you need for the next 7–10 days
If you roast coffee, it might be:
"Our primary roaster is down from Monday to Wednesday."
If you pack or manufacture, it might be:
"Our main packing line is offline for a full week."
Write that scenario down in one or two sentences somewhere everyone can see it – whiteboard, Google doc, napkin on the table. The important thing is that it’s real enough that you can feel it in your gut.
Step 2 – Ask five simple questions (no spreadsheets required)
Now, as a group or on your own, walk through these five questions.
Answer honestly: Yes / No / Not sure. No one gets a medal for pretending.
First hour: If this happened tomorrow, do we know what we’d do in the first 60 minutes?
People: If the person who "always does that" is out, is there clear handover or documentation someone else could follow?
Equipment & spares: Do we have a short list of critical spare parts and who we’d actually call for help?
Information & communication: Do we know who talks to customers, what we’d promise, and how we’d keep the team in the loop?
Cost & decisions: Do we have even a rough idea what a 3–5 day outage would cost us – and who gets to make the hard calls if it drags on?
You’re not trying to impress an auditor here. The goal is to see the gaps clearly, without judgement, while nothing is on fire.
Step 3 – Score yourself (lightly)
Give yourself a quick score for each question:
2 points – We have this in place and actually use it.
1 point – We have something, but it’s patchy / out of date / living in one person’s head.
0 points – We don’t really have this at all.
Add up your points. The maximum is 10.
A rough interpretation:
8–10 points: You’re ahead of most teams. There’s still work to do, but the basics are there.
4–7 points: You’re in the common middle. You’ll probably cope – but with more stress, cost, and risk than you’d like.
0–3 points: You’re running on muscle memory and luck. When something big goes wrong, it will hurt.
This isn’t meant to be a certified metric. It’s a conversation starter.
If you want to keep it simple, just circle the questions where you scored 0 or 1. Those are your first candidates for improvement.
Step 4 – Capture what would actually happen (not what "should" happen)
For your chosen scenario, talk it through in plain language:
What would actually happen in the first day or two?
Who would be stressed? Who would be stuck waiting for decisions?
Where would customers start to feel it?
Which parts of the operation would quietly stall because everyone is focused on the fire?
Make a few quick notes under headings like:
People – who’s overloaded, who’s critical, who’s a single point of failure
Process – what breaks, what gets skipped, what backlog builds up
Equipment & spares – what you wish you had on the shelf or in your documentation
Suppliers & customers – where the pain shows up outside your walls
You’re not trying to design the perfect response yet. You’re simply making the pain visible before you feel it.
Often, someone in the room will say something like, "If this actually happened, I’d be on the phone to X and Y immediately" – but that’s not written down anywhere. Capture those instincts. That’s the raw material for your playbook.
Step 5 – Turn insights into a short "next moves" list
A readiness audit that doesn’t lead to action is just an interesting conversation.
Before you wrap up, identify 3–5 concrete next moves you could take in the next 30–60 days.
For example:
Create a one-page first-hour playbook for your main production machine
Document the top 10–15 steps a key operator does that no one else fully understands
Build a critical spares list and check what you actually have on the shelf
Draft three simple customer communication templates for delays or partial shipments
Put one realistic "what if" discussion in the calendar every quarter
Make each move small enough that it’s realistic, and assign ownership:
Who will do it?
By when?
How will we know it’s done?
You can always come back and add more later. The important thing is to move from "we should" to "we did."
Why this kind of quick audit works
This 15-minute exercise won’t give you a full continuity plan – and it’s not meant to.
What it does do is:
Force you to name one or two realistic risks instead of vaguely worrying about "something going wrong"
Turn invisible fragility (in people, processes, equipment, suppliers) into visible, actionable gaps
Help you prioritize small, practical moves that reduce your risk without needing a huge project
Most teams are more fragile than they realize, but they’re also closer than they think to being much more resilient.
A short, honest audit like this is often enough to show you where to start.
Want help going deeper?
This quick audit is similar to the first part of what we do in FixFinder™ – CNRY’s short, structured session for mapping operational risks and deciding what to tackle first.
If you’d like to turn a 15-minute conversation into a clearer picture of your top vulnerabilities and next steps, you can learn more about FixFinder here: FixFinder
Or, if you’re not ready for that yet but this stirred up a specific "what if" scenario in your operation, feel free to reach out and I’ll point you toward some ideas tailored to your situation.
