The gaps in your tools, your process, and your story, named and sized.
A plain-language read of how your business runs. You leave with every gap it finds pointed in a direction, and a custom plan for closing them.
Three pillars. One honest read.
Each pillar answers one question, in your words. The audit is a menu of 21 checks. Yours covers the ones that fit how you work.
Your tools, and how they talk
“Do your systems work together, or are you the glue holding them together?”
- What you pay for every month, and where you pay twice
- Where the same information gets typed by hand, and where a new inquiry falls through the cracks
- Whether you can see where your clients come from, or are guessing
All 8 Connect checks
- Tools and monthly spend
- How information moves between your tools
- The booking and scheduling path
- What your website platform can and cannot do
- Measurement and analytics
- Repetitive work a system could carry
- Access and security basics
- Your email list, and whether your email is set up to arrive
Your people, process, and know-how
“If you stepped away for two weeks, what would break?”
- What runs on one person's memory and was never written down
- What a new client goes through from yes to first delivery
- Whether your team is set up to use AI well and safely
All 5 Equip checks
- Processes and procedures
- Client onboarding
- Team roles and key-person risk
- Where knowledge lives, and whether people can find it
- AI readiness
Your story, and how it travels
“Is your best work reaching the people who need it, and can you tell what is working?”
- Whether a stranger can tell in ten seconds who you are for
- Whether you own an audience, or rent attention every time
- Where the path to a booked client leaks, and whether you can see it
All 8 Amplify checks
- Brand and positioning
- Content
- Local search and your Google Business Profile
- Where your audience already gathers
- The audience you can reach directly, such as your email list
- The path from first visit to booked client
- Paid advertising
- Reputation and reviews
One idea. One size. One next move.
“The same new client is typed by hand up to four times before they are booked.”
“Four of your five core weekly workflows exist only in your head. None of them is written down.”
“Content gets made when you have a good week. There is no repeatable way it happens.”
Size is a judgment call on how big the fix is: a quick win, a project, or a rebuild.
Illustrative examples. Not real clients.
Three steps. It starts with a conversation.
Brian Reid, founder of Future Frame Studios, runs the audit with you. Twenty-plus years across operations, systems design, and filmmaking.
What it asks of you: honest answers and a list of the tools you use. Bank statements help, but are never required. The audit assesses your systems, and never asks for client or patient information.
- 1 A 30-minute fit check.A conversation about how you work and what is slowing you down. You leave knowing where the audit would start.
- 2 The intake.A questionnaire across the three pillars, answered on your own time. Then meeting time to review your answers together and walk through what happens when a new client reaches out.
- 3 The read-out.Your findings, walked through together. Then a custom plan, built around your needs and your budget.
Why the audit looks where it looks.
Outside research on each pillar, in plain words, with the limits stated. Every source is linked.
People end up as the glue between their tools.
Researchers tracked 137 people on 20 teams at three large companies. They switched between apps and websites nearly 1,200 times a day, and spent just under four hours a week getting their bearings again. That is about 9 percent of the work year. In the researchers' words: “A sizable part of their jobs is to act as the glue between disparate applications.” Harvard Business Review, 2022
The limits: these were large companies and mostly mid- and back-office jobs, watched for up to five weeks, and the authors work for a company that sells the software used to measure it. Whether the same numbers hold in a small business was not studied.
More on Connect
Many companies are slow to answer online inquiries.
An audit of 2,241 US companies found that 37 percent answered a new web inquiry within an hour, 24 percent took more than a day, and 23 percent never answered at all. In a separate study of 1.25 million inquiries, companies that tried to reach the person within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to have a real conversation with a decision maker as those that waited one more hour. Harvard Business Review, 2011
The limits: this is from 2011, it covers online sales inquiries, and one author ran a sales software company.
Email that cannot prove who sent it may not arrive.
Since February 2024, Google requires everyone who sends email to Gmail accounts to set up email authentication. Mail that does not meet its requirements “might not be delivered as expected, or might be marked as spam.” Google, Email sender guidelines
The limits: this is a rule, not a study. It does not say how many small businesses miss it.
Surgical teams had better results after a written checklist came in.
When eight hospitals in eight cities introduced a 19-item checklist for surgery, deaths fell from 1.5 percent to 0.8 percent, and complications from 11.0 percent to 7.0 percent. The checklist was designed to improve team communication and consistency of care. New England Journal of Medicine, 2009
The limits: an operating room is not your office, and this was a before-and-after study, not a randomized trial, so it shows the two went together, not that one caused the other. For an office it is a practical lesson, not a measured result: put the critical few steps in writing.
More on Equip
In one experiment, AI helped on 18 tasks and hurt on one.
In an experiment with 758 consultants at Boston Consulting Group, those using AI finished 12.2 percent more tasks, 25.1 percent faster, at more than 40 percent higher quality, on work AI handles well. On a task picked to sit outside that range, the people using AI were 19 percentage points less likely to get it right. The tool was the same. What changed was the task. Harvard Business School working paper, 2023
The limits: consultants at one top-tier firm, one AI model from 2023, and one of the authors advises the firm.
In one large survey, most people who use AI at work bring their own tools.
In a 2024 survey of 31,000 people in 31 countries, 78 percent of people who use AI at work said they bring their own AI tools. At small and medium-sized companies it was 80 percent. Microsoft and LinkedIn, 2024 Work Trend Index
The limits: people's own answers to a survey from early 2024, run for a company that sells AI tools.
A rule of thumb: most business buyers are not in the market today.
LinkedIn's B2B Institute, working with the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, puts it as a rule of thumb for companies that sell to other businesses: about 95 percent of potential buyers are not in the market right now. Its point is simple: be the name they already know when the need arrives. LinkedIn B2B Institute, the 95-5 rule
The limits: this is a rule of thumb drawn from how seldom businesses buy, not a head count. It comes from LinkedIn's own summary of the research, not the underlying paper, and LinkedIn sells advertising.
More on Amplify
In one survey, most decision-makers trusted thought leadership over marketing materials.
Edelman and LinkedIn surveyed nearly 3,500 management-level professionals in seven countries in late 2023. Nearly three in four decision-makers (73 percent) said an organization's thought leadership is “a more trustworthy basis for assessing its capabilities and competencies than its marketing materials and product sheets.” Edelman and LinkedIn, 2024 B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report
The limits: these are people's own answers, from LinkedIn members only. LinkedIn sells advertising and Edelman is a public relations firm, so both have a stake in the answer.
The usual ways of measuring ads can miss by a wide margin.
Researchers compared 12 real advertising experiments at Facebook with the usual ways of measuring ads. Those usual ways “often fail to produce the same results as true experiments.” In one case, simply comparing people who saw the ad with people who did not put the increase in online purchases at 416 percent. The experiment put it at 77 percent. Kellogg School of Management white paper, 2016
The limits: large advertisers on one platform, 12 experiments that were not picked to represent all advertising, and two of the four authors worked there.
None of these studies is about your business. That is what the audit is for.
Let's build a plan.
After the audit comes a custom plan, built for you around your needs and your budget. It lays out, line by line, the work that would be done. Whether it goes ahead is always your call.
People stay the multiplier. Nothing in the audit recommends replacing your team. The aim is to take the busywork off their plates.
Thirty minutes.
You leave knowing where to start.
Book a fit check. If the audit makes sense, it goes ahead from there. Either way, you leave knowing where it would start.