Published 18 Feb 2026  ·  Depesh Vyas

The $500 Operations Audit: What It Finds and Why It Matters Before You Scale

Before any operational engagement begins, there's a question that needs an honest answer: what is actually broken, and what needs to be fixed first?

Most founders have a sense of the problems — they're working too many hours, the team isn't executing independently, delivery quality is inconsistent, scaling feels unsafe. But "a sense of the problems" isn't a roadmap. Without a clear, prioritised picture of where the constraints actually are and how severe they are, operational work risks fixing the wrong things in the wrong order, which wastes time and money without moving the needle.

That's what the Operations Audit is designed to solve.

What the Audit Actually Is

The Operations Audit is a 7-day diagnostic that produces a scored, structured assessment of your business across six operational dimensions. It's not a generic checklist or a best-practices review — it's built from a close look at how your specific business actually runs, not how you think it runs or how you'd describe it on a good day.

The process involves reviewing your current systems and tools, mapping how decisions actually get made (vs. how you think they get made), understanding the team structure and what authority each person actually has, looking at your delivery workflow end to end, and talking through the key constraints with you directly. It ends with a report that scores each dimension and gives you a prioritised roadmap.

The Six Dimensions Assessed

Founder Dependency and Control. How much does the business depend on the founder for decisions, escalations, quality review, and execution? A score of 4/10 here — which is common — means the founder is actively involved in 5+ ownership areas (sales, hiring, pricing, delivery changes, escalations), and throughput caps at founder attention. The structural risk is that any attempt to grow increases decision load proportionally.

Team and Role Scalability. Do team members have clearly defined outcomes they're accountable for, or do they own tasks without owning results? Is the team structured to handle more volume, or do growth attempts amplify variability? A low score here typically surfaces as inconsistent sales execution, delivery quality that varies by person, and high escalation rates.

Systems and Data Maturity. How is operational data being captured and used? A business managing pipeline in Zoom recordings, billing via bank transfers and email, and internal comms via WhatsApp has a 2/10 on this dimension — fragmented data that makes it impossible to diagnose or prevent leakage at scale. This isn't a tech problem; it's a visibility problem.

Execution and Communication Cadence. Is there a weekly operating rhythm? Are numbers reviewed regularly by someone with accountability for them? Is there a repeatable meeting structure that keeps the team aligned without requiring the founder to be the connective tissue? A score of 1/10 here means the business runs on reactive coordination — which is manageable at current load and unsafe at growth load.

Revenue and Margin Health. Are current unit economics viable? Are margins vulnerable to specific failure modes — renewal failure, coordination overhead, delivery quality drops? This dimension answers whether the business model is sound at current load and what threatens it under growth pressure.

Scale Readiness. Given the above scores, is it actually safe to scale right now? A total score below 30/60 typically means the answer is no — not as a judgment, but as a structural reality. The audit names this plainly because the alternative — scaling an unprepared operation — produces worse outcomes than waiting 60–90 days to fix the foundations first.

What the Audit Produces

The output is a written report with four components. First: the BOSS Scorecard — the scored assessment across the six dimensions with specific evidence for each score (not general observations, but specific things observed about how your business actually operates). Second: the top 5 operational constraints ranked by impact, with the root cause and risk of each one named clearly. Third: a cost-of-inaction analysis — a realistic estimate of the revenue leakage, founder opportunity cost, and scaling failure risk over the next 6–12 months if the constraints go unaddressed. Fourth: a recommended next step — whether the business needs a focused Operations Sprint, a Full Partnership engagement, or something else entirely.

Why This Comes Before Anything Else

There are two reasons the audit is the required starting point rather than an optional add-on.

First, it prevents expensive misalignment. An operations engagement that goes after the wrong constraints wastes months. The audit ensures the work is scoped correctly from the start — targeting the actual bottlenecks rather than the ones that are most visible or most recently frustrating.

Second, it establishes the relationship on the right terms. Operational work is close-contact. I'm embedded in your business, working with your team, and making decisions that affect how everything runs. That requires a level of mutual understanding and trust that can't be assumed before working together. Seven days of audit work — with real deliverables, real analysis, and a real conversation about what I see — gives both sides enough information to decide whether the longer engagement makes sense.

This matters more than it sounds. I've walked away from full engagements after an audit because the fit wasn't right. That's the correct outcome in those cases. An operational engagement that isn't working well is worse for everyone than not starting one at all.

What It Is Not

The audit is not a consulting engagement where I deliver a report and disappear. It's a diagnostic that determines the next step — and if we move into an Operations Sprint or Full Partnership, the audit findings become the execution roadmap for that work. Everything built in the subsequent engagement is scoped against what the audit found.

It's also not a commitment. The $500 covers the full 7-day diagnostic and the report. At the end, you have a clear operational picture that's valuable whether or not we work together further. You can take the roadmap and execute it yourself, bring in a different operator, or move forward with VBOG. The audit is useful independent of what follows.

Who It's For

The Operations Audit is designed for service business founders at $10K–$40K MRR who are stuck in execution and want an honest, structured picture of what's actually constraining their growth before committing to a larger operational engagement. If you're planning to scale in the next 6–12 months and you don't have a clear, scored picture of your operational readiness, the audit is the right starting point.

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The Operations Audit is $500 and takes 7 days. It produces a scored diagnostic across six dimensions, a prioritised constraint list, a cost-of-inaction analysis, and a clear recommendation for next steps. Apply here — there are currently 3 company spots available.