Find what's worth automating before you spend a dollar building.
If you're drowning in manual work and tired of guessing, this is the starting point. In 1–2 weeks you get a ranked, costed roadmap, so your next dollar goes to the highest-payoff thing instead of a hunch (or whatever a vendor wanted to sell you).
- A prioritized roadmap, every opportunity ranked by ROI
- ROI & payback per item, not a vague "you'll save time"
- A clear "build this first" sequence
- The risks & gotchas, flagged before they cost you
- It's yours to keep, even if you never build with me
Most teams don't have an automation problem, they have a "where do we start?" problem.
There's busywork everywhere, a dozen tools that don't talk, and pressure to "do AI." It's genuinely hard to tell which move pays off and which one burns six months. If a few of these sound familiar, the audit was built for you.
You're drowning in manual work
The same report gets rebuilt by hand every week, with copy-paste across five tabs to do it. Everyone knows it should be automated, but nobody has time to figure out how.
You're not sure what to automate first
There are twenty ideas and no honest way to rank them. Pick wrong and you've spent the budget on the thing that looked easy instead of the thing that mattered.
You got burned before
A vendor (or a no-code experiment) built the wrong thing, it broke without anyone noticing for a month, and now you're gun-shy about spending again.
There's pressure to "do AI"
From the board, a competitor, a headline, wherever. What you need is a plan grounded in your numbers, not a science project that demos well and dies in a quarter.
- You run an established business with real volume and a lot of manual drag.
- You want an outside read before you commit a budget.
- You'd rather know the ROI up front than find out after.
- You want a plan you can hand to anyone, including a team that isn't me.
- You already know exactly what to build and just need it built. Go straight to a build.
- It's one obvious automation. You don't need a two-week study to send a Slack alert.
- You're pre-revenue with no settled process to map yet.
I map how your business really runs.
Not how the org chart or the SOP doc says it runs, but how the work moves in practice, including the spreadsheet everyone relies on and the step nobody wrote down. Here's the work behind the roadmap.
Process & systems discovery
Interviews with the people doing the work, plus screen-shares to watch the real workflow end to end. I map every step, including the ones nobody ever documented.
Data & tooling inventory
Every tool, where the data lives, what talks to what, and the gaps. I note what has an API, what's trapped in PDFs, and what's living in one person's head.
Impact + effort scoring
Each opportunity scored on two axes: the hours and dollars it frees up versus the effort and risk to build it. The quick wins separate from the money pits pretty fast.
A real ROI model
Time saved times loaded cost, error rates, and the run-rate to operate it. I keep it conservative and show the assumptions, so it holds up when your CFO reads it line by line.
A prioritized roadmap
Sequenced by payoff and dependency: what to build first, what to stage behind it, and what to leave exactly where it is for now.
The risks, named
Where it'll break, what's missing (clean data, an API, a decision owner), and the gotchas that sink these projects before the first line of code.
Sometimes the answer is "not yet," and that's a useful thing to find out for a few grand.
I'd rather lose a build than sell you one you don't need. "Not yet, and here's what to fix first" is a perfectly good outcome of an audit: you still keep the analysis that got you there, and you've avoided spending a lot more on the wrong thing.
Two weeks, kickoff to readout.
It's a fixed window with a hard deadline and a decision package at the end, not an open-ended discovery phase that drags on for a month.
Kickoff
A working session on goals, the tools, and where it hurts most. We leave with a shortlist of workflows to dig into and who I need to talk to.
Discovery
Calls with the people doing the work, screen-shares to watch the real workflow, and a map of the systems and where the data lives.
Analysis + ROI
I score every opportunity on impact and effort, build the ROI model, sequence the roadmap, and sanity-check the numbers with your team.
The readout
I walk you through the roadmap live, we work through your questions, and you keep the full package. The goal is that you leave with decisions made.
I work around your team. Expect roughly 3–4 hours total of your people's time across the two weeks (mostly the kickoff and a few short interviews in week one), and I do the heavy lifting in between.
A decision package you own, free and clear.
Everything here is yours to keep and act on, whether you build with me, build in-house, hand it to another shop, or sit on it for a quarter. Same principle as my builds: it all lives with you, and none of it depends on me sticking around.
- A prioritized automation roadmap, every opportunity ranked by ROI, in one place
- ROI & payback per item, the hours and dollars saved, the cost to build and run, the break-even
- A "build this first" sequence, what to do now, next, and later, with dependencies called out
- The risks & gotchas, what's missing and what'll break, named before it costs you
- A plain-English decision brief, a clear recommendation a non-technical exec can act on Monday
Yours, even if we never work together again. The roadmap isn't a sales doc with my name stamped on every page. It's a plain-English plan with the analysis behind it, and any competent team can pick it up and execute.
Illustrative: your workflows, your numbers.
What happens after the roadmap.
A roadmap is only worth what gets built from it, so here's what happened when teams acted on the highest-payoff items first (anonymized, since client work is under NDA).
How a fast-growing DTC brand went from "where do we start?" to a ranked plan, then shipped it.
I mapped their stack (store, ads, payments, ERP, help-desk, 3PL, and a long tail of operational tools), scored the opportunities, and sequenced the build. Top of the list was killing the 90-minute manual morning ops review, which now runs in 10 minutes off clean, unified data.
Before the audit, every planning meeting restarted the same argument about where to begin. The roadmap ended it: they knew what to build first and what it was worth before spending a dollar on a build.
[ specifics under NDA ] · anonymized + representative
Outcomes of builds the roadmaps pointed to.
Know what to build. Before you pay to build it.
locked before we start. Most land $3K–$6K.
- Discovery interviews + workflow shadowing
- Full data & tooling inventory
- Impact/effort scoring on every opportunity
- A costed ROI model with assumptions shown
- The prioritized roadmap + decision brief
- A live readout + Q&A with your team
- Building anything. That's the next step, if you want it.
- A doorstop report nobody opens.
- Org-wide change management.
- Modeling data we can't get access to.
It credits toward implementation. If you move into an Automation Build, Data Foundation, or Commerce Intelligence Engine Launch with me, the full audit fee comes off the price. If we do not continue together, you still own the plan.
- Flat fee, paid up front. There's no hourly meter running.
- 1–2 weeks, kickoff to readout.
- Credits 100% toward the next implementation with me.
- No obligation. The roadmap is yours either way.
Common questions.
Do I have to build with you after?
No. The roadmap is yours to execute however you want: with me, with your own team, or with another shop. I price the audit to stand on its own either way.
What if there's nothing worth automating?
Then that's what the readout will say. "Not yet, here's what to fix first" is a real and useful outcome, and you still keep the full analysis that got you there.
How involved does my team need to be?
Light. Plan on roughly 3–4 hours total across the two weeks, mostly the kickoff plus a few short interviews and screen-shares in week one. I work around your schedule and do the analysis in between.
Do I actually own the roadmap?
Yes, completely. It's a plain-English plan with the analysis behind it, not a locked vendor doc, so any competent team can pick it up and run with it. Same principle as my builds: you own everything.
Can it credit toward implementation?
Yes. The full audit fee comes off your first Automation Build, Data Foundation, or Commerce Intelligence Engine Launch with me, so you start implementation with a clear, costed plan instead of a guess.
Why not just figure this out ourselves?
You can, and some teams do. What you're buying is an outside read from someone who's shipped 200+ of these, an ROI model your CFO will trust, and two weeks of focused work instead of two quarters of internal debate.
Two weeks from now, you could have the plan.
A ranked, costed roadmap instead of a hunch. Worst case, I tell you to wait, and you still own the analysis that says so.