The one-page ops audit I use with new clients

One way I like to engage with a new client, is to ask them to spend twenty minutes with one document. Not a strategy session. Not a discovery call. Just this one document.

Because you can’t fix what you haven’t mapped. And most people have never actually mapped it, including, I will fully admit, me. My prospect list currently lives across three spreadsheets, several browser tabs, and at least two AI conversations I will never find again. My invoicing process is a different approach for every client, which means it’s not really a process at all. It’s a collection of manual tasks wearing a process’s clothing.

I built this audit to help clients see exactly what I just described. Turns out I need it too. That’s the thing about doing this work which is the gaps you help other people find have a way of showing up in your own business and waving.

So I’m sharing it here for the first time. Use it. I’ll be using it on myself this week.

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What the audit actually is.

One page. Five areas. Twenty minutes.

It’s not a comprehensive operational review. It’s a map of where you currently are. So that whatever comes next is based on what’s actually happening in your business, not what you think is happening or what you’d like to be happening.

Those are three very different things. The audit figures out which one you’re working from.

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The five areas.

1. Documentation - what’s written down and where it lives.

The question isn’t whether your processes are good. It’s whether they exist anywhere outside of someone’s memory. Rate yourself on a simple scale: nothing documented, some things documented, most things documented, everything documented and accessible to the right people.

Most businesses land between one and two. That’s not a failure. That’s information.

What to look for:

If a key person left tomorrow, or if you got sick and couldn’t work for two weeks, what would leave with them? What would leave with you? That’s your documentation gap.

2. Ownership - who is actually responsible for what.

Not in the org chart sense. In the ‘this thing breaks and this specific person owns fixing it’ sense. Ownership gaps are where most operational problems live, because nobody ever explicitly said ‘this is yours.’

What to look for:

Where do things fall through the cracks most often? That’s usually an ownership gap in a different outfit.

3. Client experience - what it feels like to work with you from the outside.

Onboarding, communication, handoffs, deliverables. Not whether the work is good but whether the experience of receiving it is consistent. Two clients getting the same quality of work but a completely different experience of getting it is an ops problem, not a quality one.

What to look for:

Can you write down your onboarding process in ten minutes? If not, it doesn’t exist as a real process yet. It exists as something you figure out each time.

4. Recurring work - what you do the same way every time.

Or what you should be doing the same way every time but aren’t. Recurring work is template territory. Every time you rebuild it from scratch you’re spending time you’ve already spent before. This is where I am with invoicing right now. Different client, different process, different place to track it, same amount of time lost every single month.

What to look for:

What did you do this week that you’ve done before in almost exactly the same way? That’s your next template.

5. Bottlenecks - where things slow down or stop.

Where do things wait on you? Where do they wait on someone else? Where do they just wait? A bottleneck isn’t always a person it can be sometimes a missing decision, a missing handoff, a process that only one person knows how to run.

What to look for:

What could move faster in your business if one specific thing changed? That’s your priority bottleneck.

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How to actually use this.

Open a doc. Give yourself twenty minutes. Answer honestly and how they actually are right now. That’s the only version that’s useful.

Rate each area one to four. One is nothing in place. Four is fully functioning and not dependent on any single person. Most areas will land at two. That’s normal. That’s also where the work is.

When you’re done, the lowest-scoring area is where you start. Because it’s the most foundational. You build from the bottom of the gap, not the top.

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What I’ve found doing this with clients, and what I found doing it on myself.

The most common lowest-scoring area is ownership. Not documentation, which is usually what people expect. Ownership. Because most small businesses were built by one person doing everything, and the transition from ‘one person doing everything’ to ‘people with actual clear ownership of specific things’ is a transition nobody explicitly manages.

The second most common surprise: the bottleneck isn’t what they thought it was. They come in thinking the problem is time. The audit usually shows the problem is a missing handoff or a process that only one person knows how to run.

When I went through this on my own business this week, my lowest-scoring area was recurring work. Which makes sense, I’ve been so focused on building the client side of Marlowe that I’ve been rebuilding my own internal processes from scratch every time. The prospect tracker, the invoicing, the onboarding for new clients. All of it manual, all of it inefficient, all of it costing me time I don’t have.

I know. I know.

Building it now. That’s the whole point.

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One thing before you go.

Take the audit this week. Twenty minutes, honest answers, lowest score first.

Then hit reply and tell me what your lowest-scoring area is. 

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— Nicki

Marlowe Strategies publishes every Tuesday. If someone forwarded this to you and you want in, subscribe at marlowestrategies.substack.com