Readiness for portfolios: one score, many properties.

The same fix, found once, usually applies everywhere

A small coffee roastery running three shopfronts alongside its online store might expect three separate readiness reviews, one per site, each turning up its own list of problems. In practice, the first review usually explains most of what the other two will find too, because the actual gaps tend to live in shared systems, not in whatever's different about each shop.

If the roastery's stock sync between its till system and its website is unreliable at one shop, it's very likely unreliable at the other two as well, since all three probably run on the same underlying till software connected the same way. Fixing that connection once, rather than diagnosing three separate "stock accuracy" problems, closes most of the gap across every site at once. The readiness review's real value here is spotting that the pattern is shared before three separate teams spend three separate weeks solving what's really one problem.

What's genuinely different site to site is usually small

Real differences do exist: one shop might have a smaller range, another might not do mail order from its physical counter, opening hours vary. These genuinely need checking per site, because an agent asking about a specific shop needs the specific truth for that shop, not the group average. The useful distinction is between the shared system, worth fixing once, and the local facts sitting on top of it, which still need their own attention even after the shared fix lands.

Rolling the fix out is faster than it sounds, once the pattern's clear

Once the roastery knows the stock sync issue is systemic rather than shop-specific, applying the fix to all three locations is a smaller job than solving it three times from scratch would have been, because the actual technical work, connecting the till system properly, is identical at each site. What used to look like three months of separate diagnostic work becomes one diagnosis and three applications of the same fix.

The trap is treating every site as its own investigation

The opposite approach, letting each shop's manager run its own separate readiness process with no comparison across sites, tends to rediscover the same root cause three times over, at three times the cost, while making the same shared gap look like three unrelated problems. Comparing results across sites before committing to fixes is what turns three readiness reviews into one diagnosis with three easy rollouts.

This gets harder, not easier, once a chain has grown by acquisition rather than by opening new shops from scratch. A fourth roastery bought from a previous owner might run an entirely different till system, in which case the shared-fix assumption breaks and the new site genuinely does need its own separate diagnosis, at least until it's brought onto the same underlying system as the other three. Knowing which situation you're in, one shared system with local variation, or genuinely separate systems that happen to sell the same coffee, is itself worth establishing before assuming either story is the right one.

Connecting the shared systems once, so a fix found at one site is checkable and applicable everywhere the same gap exists, while each site's own real, local facts stay accurately its own, is exactly the layer Selfe builds.

Should we still run a readiness check at every site?

Yes, but compare the results before acting. A shared cause across sites is common enough that it's worth checking for before treating each result as its own project.

What if the sites genuinely are quite different from each other?

Then more of what's flagged will be genuinely local, and less will roll out for free. The comparison still tells you which is which before you start fixing anything.