The One-Week Process Audit

Every engagement I take starts the same way: five days inside your office, watching how the work actually gets done. Not how the binder says it is done, and not how the owner thinks it is done. At the end you get four documents and a number, the hours per week your team could have back. Fixed price, and no obligation to hire me for the fixes.

It is the front door to all three things I do. Whether the answer turns out to be documentation, automation, custom software, or simply changing a process so a task stops existing, the audit is how we find out before anyone spends money building the wrong thing.

Who It Is For

Businesses with roughly five to fifty people where the day runs on a few individuals who know how everything works. Dispatch desks, clinics and labs, service companies, offices with a shared inbox that one person watches. The symptoms are familiar:

• Work stops, or slows badly, when one specific person is out
• Procedures live in someone's head, or in a shared drive nobody can navigate
• The same problem gets fixed twice a month because the fix never made it into the process
• Data is typed into one system and then typed again into another
• Nobody can say how many hours a week the Friday report really costs
• An inspector or auditor is coming and the records are reconstructed, not produced

What Happens During the Week

Days 1 and 2: Shadow

I sit with the people who do the work, not just the people who manage it. I follow a request from the moment it arrives to the moment it is closed, and I write down every handoff, every workaround, and every place the official procedure and the real one disagree.

Days 3 and 4: Map and Measure

Every recurring process goes on one list with an owner, where its instructions live today, the tools it touches, and an honest estimate of the hours it eats per week. Your team reviews the list and corrects it. That review is where the biggest surprises usually come from.

Day 5: Rank and Deliver

I sort the work into three piles: automate it, document it, or change the process so the work goes away. Each fix gets a payoff estimate and a rough cost, and you get the ranked list in a short walkthrough rather than a slide deck.

What You Get

01. Process Inventory

The map of how the office runs. Most owners have never seen the whole thing on one page, and most are surprised by how many processes there are and how many have no written procedure at all. It is worth having even if you do nothing else with it.

02. Time-Sink Ranking

The number everyone asks about. For each recurring task, the hours it costs per week and what it would take to get them back, ranked so you pick by payoff rather than by whichever complaint was loudest. Some of the largest entries are fixed by deleting a step, not by buying software.

03. Gap and Risk List

Where the business is one resignation or one inspection away from a bad week. Processes that live in one head, records that are written up after the fact, access that nobody revoked, and the procedures you are required to have and do not. Plain language, no theater.

04. 90-Day Plan

The first three months, in order. What I would build, what I would document, and which items your team can handle without me. Each line has a rough price, so the plan doubles as a quote you can take anywhere.

A Typical Result

The example on the home page is drawn from this kind of week at a dispatch desk: fourteen recurring processes mapped, three of them living entirely in one person's head, a shared inbox eating six and a half hours a week, and paper temperature logs that an app should have been keeping. Eleven hours a week back, most of it from two fixes. The clinical lab case study shows what the same approach looked like with an inspection on the calendar.

Questions People Ask First

What does it cost?

A fixed price agreed before the week starts, sized to the number of people I need to shadow. You will know the figure before you commit, and it does not change if the week turns up more than expected.

Do you fix the process before adding software?

Yes, and usually instead of. The ranking regularly shows that the most expensive task should be removed rather than automated. Tools come last, and only where a step genuinely has to exist.

How much of my team's time does it take?

Mostly mine. The people I shadow keep doing their jobs while I watch; the review on day three or four is about an hour for the group. Owners spend roughly two hours across the week.

Will the documents sit in a drawer?

They are written to be used: a ranked list you can act on Monday, and an inventory that becomes the skeleton of your documentation system if you go on to build one. I do not deliver binders.

Remote or on-site?

On-site for the shadowing in the Tulsa metro, including Broken Arrow, Bixby, Owasso, Jenks, Sand Springs, and Sapulpa. Remote audits work when the processes are mostly in software; we decide that on the first call.

What if we do not want to continue after the week?

Then you keep the four documents and the plan, and you have spent one fixed fee to find out exactly where the hours go. That is the design. Most clients do continue, and they start with the item at the top of the ranking.