Most “free audits” in professional services are sales calls with a worksheet.
You get 45 minutes of pain discovery, a pitch, and a follow-up email the next morning trying to close the engagement. Nothing wrong with selling — that’s how businesses work. But calling it an audit is generous.
Here’s what mine is, step by step, including the things I don’t do.
What you send me before the call
A short questionnaire. Five minutes to fill in. No documents to sign, no NDA, no spreadsheet to complete.
I ask for enough to walk into the conversation prepared: the shape of your business, who does what, the tools you’re paying for, the one or two things frustrating you enough to have booked a call. If you can’t articulate the frustration yet, that’s fine — we’ll find it together.
I read it before we talk. If there’s something obvious I can already see — a tool overlapping another tool, a process that two other clients have also struggled with — I come in knowing that.
The 60 to 90 minute conversation
Call it an hour and a half at the outside. The shape is:
- The first 10 minutes: what does your week actually look like, and where does time go that you wish it didn’t.
- The middle 40 minutes: I trace the workflow. Lead in, work done, invoice out, client offboard. Where are the handoffs? Where does information get copy-pasted? Who’s the bottleneck?
- The last 20 minutes: people. How is your manager doing? What’s the team’s morale like? Is anyone quietly stretched?
I ask a lot. I say less than you might expect. Most of the value is in hearing yourself describe the business out loud — it’s often the first time anyone’s asked the question in that order.
Three lenses I look through
Process. Where the work happens. I’m looking for the places where the same information gets typed in twice, where a handover drops the ball, where a decision keeps going to the wrong person because nobody’s made the call about who should own it. If process turns out to be where your cost is, the five manual processes worth automating first is a fair map of where I usually start.
Tools. What you’re paying for and what you’re getting. Usually there’s a tool with features you don’t use, and another tool you’ve built workarounds for because it can’t do something basic. Sometimes the right call is to drop one and expand another; sometimes it’s to build a small bit of custom glue.
People. How the team is running. Who’s stretched. Who has a manager that hasn’t been trained. Whether there are behaviours going unaddressed. Whether the founder is still the bottleneck for decisions the team could be making.
What you get at the end
A written summary. Three to five pages. No slick deck. No diagrams you’ll never open again.
It covers:
- What I saw, in the language you used
- The two or three things that are costing you the most
- Two or three options for each, ordered by what I’d do first
- Rough time and rough cost — honest ranges, not a quote dressed up as a menu
- What you could do without me
That last one matters. If there’s a fix you can implement yourself in an afternoon, I tell you. If there’s something worth building together, I scope it. If there’s nothing worth doing, I say that too.
What it isn’t
It isn’t a pitch. If you say at the end that you want to sit with it and think, I thank you for the time. I don’t chase. I don’t “check in”. If something’s right for you later, you know where I am.
It isn’t a sales discovery call dressed in professional clothes. The audit is the work — the hour I spend with you is paid for by the follow-on engagements that do come out of it, which is how I can offer it for free in the first place.
It isn’t a generic framework being applied to your business. I don’t have a slide deck called “The 7 Pillars of Operational Excellence” and I’m not going to produce one for you. Every summary I write is specific to the business I just spent 90 minutes inside.
What most people get wrong
The most common thing I hear afterwards is: “I thought you were going to be selling me something the whole time, and you just asked me questions.”
That’s the point. The audit isn’t a sales technique. It’s how I work out whether there’s anything I can do that would actually help — and, if there isn’t, how I free both of us up to move on.
It isn’t a junior exercise either. I spent 14 years at CSIRO, the last four leading its automation team — tracing exactly this kind of flow and pulling the friction out of it, at enterprise scale: 65% less manual effort, around $450K a year saved, 100% retention over that period. The audit is that same lens, scaled down to a business with 5 to 50 staff.
If you’ve been meaning to sort the operational side of your business out for a while but haven’t, this is the lowest-cost way to start. Book a free audit and we’ll make a useful hour out of it.