A fixed-fee examination of how the business actually runs: where revenue work starts and stalls, which system is allowed to be right, and which decisions still route through you.
For owner-led businesses across the United States with proven demand, where follow-up, systems or exceptions still route through the owner.
What you receive
Four documents
Each one is a written deliverable of the audit, useful on its own before any implementation is discussed.
The audit assumes the business already works. It is a diagnostic for owner-led companies with proven demand, where the constraint has stopped being sales and started being the way work moves through the business. What matters is the shape of the problem rather than the size of the company: whether the owner has become the part of the system that everything routes through.
A change already under way — a system being replaced, a team being restructured — is not a reason to wait. It is often the moment when ownership and handoffs are worth examining. What matters is whether access and people can be arranged. If the audit is not the right entry point, we say so before it is scoped rather than after it is paid for.
Five topics, usually taken in this order, because each one tends to depend on the answer to the one before it. Which of them carries the most weight is decided by what the engagement actually finds.
The audit is a fixed-fee diagnostic, and these four documents are what it produces. They are written to be acted on: specific enough to work from, and clear about what each recommendation depends on.
Answers: how does the work actually move today?
One row for each stage of a critical path, recording four things: where the fact lives, who owns it, what proves it happened, and what happens if it stalls. It is built from what the systems and the working session show, then returned to you for correction before anything is ranked against it.
Where a row cannot be completed, that gap is the finding.
Answers: what is holding the business back, and in what order does it matter?
Every finding carries the same five fields — observed, constraint, consequence, recommendation, sequence — so the report can be read in priority order rather than front to back. Ranking is by leverage: how much of the owner's week, and how much revenue risk, the constraint accounts for.
Dependencies are named explicitly, because most operational fixes are only safe once an earlier decision has been made.
Answers: what is the smallest sequence that protects revenue and reduces owner dependence?
A planning horizon, not a delivery schedule. It sets the order in which changes stop undoing each other: what to change first, what depends on it, and what is deliberately deferred until the ground under it is settled.
The bands describe sequence and dependency, not dates, and they are not a promise of an outcome. Delivery timing is agreed separately, inside the implementation scope.
Answers: what would implementation involve, and where do you get to stop?
The work the findings imply, broken into stages, with a decision point at each boundary — so the scope can be reviewed stage by stage rather than agreed once at the start.
Implementation is separate work, scoped and agreed before it begins. The audit and its deliverables are complete on their own.
A single finding, and the prioritized path the findings are sequenced into.
Illustrative sample
Written to show the format, the questions each page answers, and the standard the deliverable holds.
Illustrative sample
Every finding carries the same five fields, so the report can be read in priority order rather than front to back.
Illustrative sample
A 30 / 60 / 90 path sets sequence and dependency. It is the order in which changes stop undoing each other — protect revenue first, make the process reproducible next, automate only what is already clear. Delivery dates belong to the implementation scope, which is agreed separately.
Days 1–30Protect revenue and remove ambiguity.
Days 31–60Make the process reproducible.
Days 61–90Automate only what is already clear.
On a real engagement the bands are filled from the findings, in the order the findings rank. The structure stays the same; the contents do not.
Five stages. This is how an audit typically runs; the depth of each one, and how long it takes, follows the paths in scope and what they turn out to involve.
What we need from you
Before the clock starts
Read access is enough. The audit does not need permission to change anything, and does not change anything.
Audit terms
The Operations Audit is $2,500, a fixed fee. Implementation is scoped from the findings, in the order the audit recommends. An operating retainer is optional and month-to-month, where continuing work is warranted.
Typically completed within 10 business days after kickoff and receipt of the required access and information; timing is descriptive, not a guarantee. The audit fee may be credited toward qualifying implementation begun within 30 days, subject to the engagement agreement.
The fixed fee covers the diagnostic: the current-state map, the ranked findings, the prioritized path and the implementation scope. That set is deliberately complete on its own, so the decisions it records are usable before any build work is agreed.
The fee covers the diagnostic deliverables, not the build. Implementation is scoped from the findings and agreed separately, in the order the findings rank.
Audit terms
Typically completed within 10 business days after kickoff and receipt of the required access and information; timing is descriptive, not a guarantee. The audit fee may be credited toward qualifying implementation begun within 30 days, subject to the engagement agreement. These terms describe the audit; implementation timing is agreed in its own scope.
Implementation is separate work, scoped from the audit's findings and agreed before it begins. The audit is built to stand on its own: the map, the ranked findings and the sequenced path say what to change and in what order, whether or not the build follows.
Replacement is not the starting assumption. The audit first asks whether clearer rules inside the systems already in use would resolve the constraint — which system is authoritative, how records are matched, who owns each handoff.
Where the findings show that existing tools cannot support what the business needs, a replacement appears as a finding with the constraint behind it and the decisions it depends on, not as a recommendation to buy something.
Read access to the systems already in use, a working session with the people who run the work, and examples of a normal week and a bad week. Typically completed within 10 business days after kickoff and receipt of the required access and information; timing is descriptive, not a guarantee.
The audit fee may be credited toward qualifying implementation begun within 30 days, subject to the engagement agreement.
Then that is the finding, written down with the evidence behind it. A short report with three findings and no implementation recommendation is a legitimate outcome. The fee is for the examination, not for a predetermined list of work to sell afterwards.
Yes. The audit follows critical paths rather than org charts, so a single revenue path — inquiry through to payment, or order through to fulfilment — is a sensible scope. Which paths are in scope is agreed at kickoff.
The fastest way to find out whether the audit is the right entry point is to describe an actual bad week — what broke, what you caught in time, and what only you knew. If it is not the right entry point, we will say so.
