The audit

Why an audit and not a proposal

Because I don’t know your business yet, and neither of us should be making a twelve-month decision on a guess.

I’d rather spend a week finding out what’s actually true, write it down, and let you decide from evidence. If the honest answer is that there isn’t enough here to justify going further, I’ll tell you that — and you’ll still have a document worth having.

What I look at

Where the hours actually go

Not impressions, counted numbers. How many support emails and calls a week, split between order chasing, repeat product questions, and things that genuinely need a person.

This becomes the baseline. Everything afterwards gets measured against it, which is the only way either of us knows whether this worked.

Whether your backup works

I take your backup, restore it onto a different machine, open it, and check yesterday’s orders are in it.

This takes an hour and it’s the single most valuable hour of the week. A surprising number of businesses discover, in that hour, that they don’t have a backup at all.

What the business depends on

Usually one person, one supplier relationship, one undocumented system, and one developer who’s been maintaining it for years without the source code ever being in your possession.

None of that is a criticism. All of it is worth knowing before it becomes a problem on a Monday morning.

Whether your data can get out

Your operational system holds the answers to most of the questions customers ask. If nothing can read it, nothing downstream can be automated.

So I find out: does it have an export, a readable database, an interface? This determines what’s actually possible, and I’d rather know in week one than promise something in month three.

The step nobody has questioned

There’s usually one part of the process that exists because it always has. Sometimes there’s a good reason. Sometimes there isn’t, and removing it is worth more than anything technical I could build.

The paperwork nobody enjoys

Import documentation, commodity codes, VAT treatment on goods coming in. Frequently a hidden time sink, and occasionally a risk nobody has looked at closely.

What must not be touched

Just as important as the rest. Systems that work well get left alone, and I’ll put that in writing so you know exactly what I’m not proposing to change.

What you get

A written document, in plain English, that covers:

Where the hours go, with real numbers
What’s exposed, ranked by how much it would hurt
Whether the backup works, and what to do about it
What could be automated, what it would take, and what it’s worth
What should be left alone
What I’d recommend doing first, and what can wait

Plus a conversation to go through it.

The terms


Time	One week, sometimes two for a larger business
Fee	From £1,500, fixed and agreed before I start
Yours	The document is yours outright, whatever happens next
Obligation	None. If you want a quote for the work afterwards, I’ll give you one

What it needs from you

A couple of hours of conversation, access to look at things, and an introduction to whoever maintains your existing systems. That’s genuinely it.

And afterwards

If it’s worth doing more, I’ll quote you properly — a one-off setup fee and a monthly retainer from £1,250, with the software bought in your own name at cost.

If it isn’t, you’ve got a document that tells you where you’re exposed, and I’ll have said so honestly. That’s a reasonable outcome for a week and a fixed fee.