Operations & Governance — Efficiency Audit
Find out what your business actually costs to run.
Not the number on the P&L — the real one. The one that includes the subscriptions nobody cancelled, the manual work that eats Tuesday mornings, the supplier contracts that auto-renewed at a higher rate, and the three tools that all do the same thing.
Why bother
A pound saved is worth more than a pound won.
Revenue is exciting. Efficiency is boring. But a pound you stop wasting drops straight to the bottom line — no acquisition cost, no ad spend, no sales cycle.
Most owner-run companies we meet are leaving 10–25% of their gross margin on the table. Not through incompetence — through growth. The systems that worked at £500k don’t work at £2m. The audit finds where the gap is, how much it costs, and what to fix first.
Where it hides
Six places money and time disappear.
Spend
Subscriptions nobody uses, contracts that auto-renewed at a higher rate, suppliers who raised prices and nobody noticed.
Time
Manual work that could be automated, meetings that should be emails, approval chains that exist because of one incident three years ago.
Process
Steps that duplicate each other, handoffs where things fall through, workarounds that became permanent.
Tools
Three systems doing the job of one, spreadsheets duct-taped together, and the one person who knows how it all works.
Ownership
Tasks that belong to everybody and therefore nobody. Work that gets done twice, or not at all, because accountability is vague.
Risk
Single points of failure — the one employee who holds every password, the single supplier with no backup, the compliance gap nobody has checked.
How the audit runs
From first call to costed recommendations.
Weeks 1–2
Get under the bonnet
We map your costs, contracts, team time, tools and processes. No surveys — we sit with the people who do the work and watch what actually happens.
Week 3
The findings deck
A clear, prioritised report: here’s what it’s costing you, here’s what to fix first, and here’s what each fix is worth in real money.
Weeks 4+
Implement together
We build the frameworks, renegotiate the contracts, automate the workflows and train your team. Scoped and priced from whatever the audit surfaces.
Ongoing
Mentoring & accountability
Monthly or fortnightly check-ins to keep the momentum, solve new problems as they surface, and make sure nothing slides back. Mentoring
Pricing
Know the number before we start.
The Audit
from £2,800 fixed
A full efficiency review of your costs, time, processes and tools — with a prioritised findings deck and costed recommendations.
Implementation
quoted from findings
We build the frameworks, renegotiate contracts, automate workflows and train your team. Scoped and priced from whatever the audit surfaces.
If the audit doesn’t find enough to justify its fee, we refund it. We’ve never had to.
Questions
Frequently asked.
How long does the audit take?
Two to three weeks, depending on the size of the business and how many people we need to talk to. You’ll have the findings deck by the end of week three.
Do we have to use you for the implementation?
No. The findings deck is yours — you can take it to your own team, another supplier, or do nothing. Most clients ask us to implement because we already know the business by that point, but there’s no obligation.
Will it be disruptive to the team?
We design the audit to be low-friction. Most of the time we observe and ask questions — we don’t pull people into workshops or demand weeks of their calendar.
What size company is this for?
Owner-run businesses turning over £250k–£5m. Big enough to have real operational complexity, small enough that there isn’t a COO or ops director handling it already.