The Operational Maturity Assessment built for mid-market companies

The Operational Maturity Assessment built for mid-market companies.

Most operational frameworks were built for one of two audiences catering to startups building from zero or enterprise companies with dedicated operations departments and seven-figure consulting budgets.

Mid-market companies exist in the gap between these two worlds — complex enough to require formal systems, and not yet large enough to justify the overhead those enterprise-scale methodologies assume.

The HQ Score is the operational maturity assessment calibrated specifically for companies operating in this range.

How the HQ Score Works

30 questions. 10 dimensions. One score from 0 to 100.

Each dimension assesses a distinct layer of operational maturity. Your total HQ Score reflects the aggregate maturity of your operation across all ten dimensions.

The Ten Dimensions:

D01) Process Documentation Coverage → Are your critical operational processes documented in a form that any qualified person could follow and execute independently, without asking anyone for guidance?

D02) Key Person Redundancy → If the most operationally critical person on your team were unavailable tomorrow with no notice, what would actually happen to your operation?

D03) Vendor Contract Quality → Do your vendor contracts protect your operational and commercial interests at the specific clause level that determines what happens when something goes wrong?

D04) Team Structure Clarity → Does every person on your operations team know, without asking, exactly which decisions fall within their authority to make independently?

D05) Measurement Sophistication → Does your operations dashboard surface leading indicators that allow you to act before problems compound, or does it report only the lagging financial metrics that confirm what has already happened?

D06) Technology Coherence → Is your technology stack the result of deliberate architectural decisions, or has it accumulated through ad hoc problem-solving that has left gaps, redundancies, and unplanned dependencies?

D07) Decision Rights Clarity → Is decision authority in your company explicitly documented, or does each significant decision require an informal negotiation about who actually has the authority to make it?

D08) Meeting Design Quality → Do your operational meetings consistently produce documented decisions with named owners and defined completion standards, or do they primarily produce status updates?

D09) Onboarding Effectiveness → Does your onboarding architecture bring a new operations hire to independent execution within a defined and measurable timeframe, or does ramp time depend entirely on who happens to be available?

D10) Operational Leverage → Are your operational costs growing more slowly than your revenue, and do you have a documented, board-ready measurement of that relationship?

Who the HQ Score Is For

The HQ Score is designed for operations leaders, founders managing operations directly, and functional leaders in finance, procurement, and other roles whose decisions directly affect how an operation performs and scales.

If you are responsible for how your company's operations run — at any level, the HQ Score tells you where your operation sits across all dimensions and what the highest-priority next step is at your current maturity stage.

It takes 10 minutes. It is completely free.

No email is required to complete the assessment. Your total HQ Score and your operational stage are displayed immediately on the results page.

You can share your email on the results page to receive your priority focus areas and the specific Headroom HQ resources matched to each priority focus area. We typically send this within 1 business day.

Register for HQ Score - Early Access

What early access includes:

Immediate: OFA-02 (Southwest Airlines), OFA-03 (Knight Capital Group), and The Operations Leader's AI Evaluation Framework — subscriber-exclusive content available from the moment you subscribe.

At HQ Score launch: You are notified the day the HQ Score goes live, before the general announcement.

Note: You can access subscriber-exclusive content on Headroom HQ for free by registering for early access. You can login to Headroom HQ website with the same email you have used for early access registration to access the free subscriber-only content.

Questions?

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The HQ Score is a proprietary assessment developed by Headroom HQ. The methodology, scoring architecture, and dimension framework are protected intellectual property. Benchmark data derived from completed assessments may be published in aggregate and anonymized form only.

For questions about the HQ Score methodology, assessment design, or results interpretation, contact us at hello@theheadroomhq.com

The HQ Score is a proprietary assessment developed by Headroom HQ. The methodology, scoring architecture, and dimension framework are protected intellectual property. Benchmark data derived from completed assessments may be published in aggregate and anonymized form only.

For questions about the HQ Score methodology, assessment design, or results interpretation, contact us at hello@theheadroomhq.com