Frame the audit

Frame the audit around the decision the company has to make, and write that decision down before anyone opens a dashboard. The data you need and the people you interview both follow from it. Skip this step and you get a thorough tour of the business with recommendations nobody has to act on.

The output of this chapter is a one-page framing note, approved by whoever owns the decision. As an illustration, say a B2B SaaS at 2M ARR, with a free trial, a small sales team for larger accounts, and net new ARR flat for three quarters. The founder’s request is “find out why growth has stalled”. You can’t answer that as written.

Turn the request into a goal with a number and a date

People arrive with a symptom or a favorite solution. Your first job is to trace it back to a business goal, then to state what the audit has to establish about that goal.

What you hear	What usually sits behind it	Framed goal (illustrative)
“Growth has stalled”	Net new ARR is flat	Go from 2M to 3M ARR in 12 months and identify the constraint that blocks it
“We need more leads”	Sales has capacity left, or believes it does	Establish whether pipeline volume or pipeline quality limits new ARR
“Our SEO is underperforming”	Someone compared traffic with a competitor	Decide how much of next year’s new ARR organic can carry
“Churn feels high”	A few painful cancellations	Measure retention by cohort and segment, then decide whether it caps growth

Check that the number is one leadership already tracks and that a named person will decide on the result. If the founder and the head of sales give you two different goals, stop and get them in a room. That disagreement is the first finding of your audit.

Write the questions the audit has to settle

A good audit question has a decision attached. If no possible answer would change what the company does next, cut the question. I keep the list to about six, because each extra question thins the analysis of the others.

Question	Decision it drives	Evidence needed
Which stage of the funnel limits new ARR?	Where the next two quarters of effort go	Stage rates by segment and source
Who buys, who stays and who expands?	Which segment to target, which to stop serving	CRM and billing joined at account level
Which channels pay back, and how fast?	How the budget is split	CAC and payback per channel
Can the team carry out the plan?	Hire, outsource or reduce scope	Interviews, shipping history
Is the data good enough to answer the above?	Whether tracking work comes first	Review of tracking and attribution

The last row belongs in every audit, and the data reliability chapter covers how to answer it. The first one needs the business written as a formula, which is the job of the growth equation.

Give the audit a provisional verdict

Spend the first half day on a quick pass: the revenue curve, rough funnel rates, signups by source, and some time on the site as a stranger. Then write three sentences. What is already solid, where the real lever seems to be, and therefore what the audit will focus on.

On an audit I ran for a B2B SaaS, that first pass showed traffic with good foundations and a conversion side nobody had really worked on. So the analysis went to conversion: what each page was for, whether the funnel labels matched reality, where the calls to action led. A standard SEO checklist would have spent its time on the part that was already fine.

The verdict can turn out wrong, and you change it when the data says so. Its value is that it forces you to choose how deep to go on each area, and to write the choice down.

Area (illustrative SaaS)	Depth	Reason
Trial to paid, onboarding	Deep	The provisional verdict points here
Segments and ICP	Deep	Larger accounts seem to behave differently
Organic and content	Medium	Healthy traffic, review the conversion side only
Paid ads	Light	Small budget, no decision pending
Infrastructure, legal	Out of scope	Other people are better placed

Tell the client what you did not dig into, and leave recommendations to someone else where you are not the best placed. An auditor with an opinion on everything loses credibility on the points that matter.

Secure the access on day one

Send the list with the framing note and ask for read access only. Where account-level data is enough, ask for exports with pseudonymized identifiers, and make sure your contract covers the personal data you will see.

Source	What you use it for	Who usually grants it	Level to request
Web analytics (GA4 or equivalent)	Traffic, paths, on-site conversions	Marketing	Viewer
Search Console	Queries, indexing, click-through rate	Marketing or tech	Restricted user
Ad accounts	Spend and results by campaign	Marketing or agency	Read-only
CRM	Pipeline, stages, close rates, sources	Sales ops	Read-only or export
Billing	MRR, churn, expansion	Finance	Read-only or export
Product analytics or database	Activation and usage	Product or data	Read-only, or export
Email and lifecycle tool	Sequences and engagement	Marketing	Read-only
Support tool	Contact and cancellation reasons	Customer success	Export
CMS or site repository	Templates and tags	Tech	Viewer

Log the date you asked and the date you received each one. When an access takes weeks to arrive or nobody knows who owns a tool, note it, because the audit of the stack and organization will need that fact.

Choose who to talk to

Book 30 to 45 minutes with each person and ask about the last time something happened. General opinions give you the company’s official story, and the last lost deal gives you what actually occurred.

Person	What you are after	A question that works
Founder or CEO	The goal, the constraints, past attempts	What have you already decided not to do?
Head of sales and two reps	Real objections, lead quality	Walk me through the last deal you lost.
Marketing	What is measured and how	Which number do you trust least?
Product	Activation and roadmap	Which action tells you a user will stay?
Customer success	Reasons for leaving	Who should never have bought?
Finance	Margin and cash constraints	How exactly do you compute the ARR you report?
Customers: recent, lost, churned	The real buying story	What were you using before, and what made you look elsewhere?

Keep a running list of contradictions. When sales says leads are poor and marketing reports a record quarter, you have found a definition problem or a real targeting problem, and either one shapes the rest of the audit. The customer conversations feed directly into the ICP and positioning work.

What to deliver: the framing note

One page, in plain words, sent before the analysis starts.

Field	What to write
Decision owner	One name
Business goal	Metric, from what value to what value, by what date
Decision the audit informs	One sentence
Questions to settle	About six, each with its decision
Provisional verdict	Already solid, real lever, focus of the audit
Scope	Depth per area, what is left out, who is better placed
Access	Source, owner, date requested, date received
Interviews	Name, role, date
Deliverable	Prioritized action sheet and six-month roadmap
Presentation date	Booked now, with the people who decide

Your next step: write the business goal as one sentence with a metric, a value and a date, then send it to the founder and the head of sales separately and compare what comes back.