Hi, I'm Ari 👋
I can help you automate tasks and answer questions about your business.
ServicesProcess Automation Audit
PROCESS AUTOMATION AUDIT
A structured assessment of your processes, tools, and operations. Tells you what to automate, what to leave alone, and what to fix manually first. Platform-agnostic, built around your business case, delivered as a written report and a presentation.
Representative example. Real reports are built around your processes and your numbers.
Platform-agnostic. We work in Zapier, Make.com, n8n, HubSpot, Salesforce, and custom builds.
WHAT IT IS, WHAT IT ISN'T
Most automation discovery calls are disguised pitches. This is a paid service with a real deliverable, run as analysis instead of sales. The framing matters, so here is exactly what we mean and what we do not.
Two to four weeks of structured discovery, analysis, and synthesis. Ends with a written report and a presentation to your team. You can take the report and act on it however you want. We do not gate the deliverable behind a build commitment.
We work in Zapier, Make.com, n8n, HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, custom code, and combinations. The audit recommends the right tool for each opportunity. We are not trying to steer you toward our preferred stack because we do not have one.
Every recommendation includes time saved, cost saved, error rate reduction, or revenue impact, expressed in actual numbers from your operations. If we cannot quantify the impact, we say so and move that opportunity down the list.
We charge for this work because doing it properly takes two to four weeks of senior time and produces a real artifact. The output is yours regardless of whether you hire us for the build. Most clients do. Some do not. Both outcomes are normal.
We are not going to recommend Zapier just because we are good at Zapier. If your situation calls for n8n self-hosted because of data residency, we say so. If your situation calls for not automating at all, we say that too.
We scope to automation specifically. Adjacent territory (org design, hiring plans, fundamental business model questions) is out of scope. We will flag it when we see it, but we will not pretend to be the right firm to fix it.
OUR DIAGNOSTIC FRAMEWORK
Every process in scope gets scored against the same framework. The framework is not glamorous. It is what makes the report defensible when you take it to leadership and to budget conversations.
01
Does the process actually exist as documented?
Most processes are described by leadership and executed differently in practice. We map both and report the gap. Automating an undocumented process amplifies the chaos.
02
How much human time does this consume?
We measure actual time spent through interviews and observation, then multiply by loaded labor cost. Gets you a defensible number for the business case in front of leadership or finance.
03
How often does this run?
Automation economics depend on volume. A process that runs 5 times a quarter has different ROI math from one that runs 500 times a day. We measure actual frequency, not estimated.
04
What does it cost when it goes wrong?
Manual processes fail in predictable ways. We measure error rates, downstream rework, and customer impact. Often the rework cost is bigger than the direct labor cost.
05
Are the right tools in place to make automation viable?
Some automation opportunities need infrastructure that does not exist yet (a CRM, a database, an API). We assess what is in place and what would need to be added before automation is realistic.
06
Will the affected team actually use the automated version?
Some teams want automation. Some are quietly resistant because the manual version preserves a job, a sense of control, or a workaround for a deeper problem. We surface this honestly.
07
Does automating this serve a real priority?
An automation opportunity with strong ROI math can still be the wrong place to invest if it does not move the needle on what your business actually needs to fix this year. We always score against strategic relevance.
THE DELIVERABLE
A written report (typically 40 to 60 pages), a live presentation to your team, and the underlying data and analysis. You own all of it. The report is detailed enough that you could hand it to any competent firm and they would know what to build.
01
A two-to-three page version of the entire report. The version you forward to a CFO or board member who will not read 50 pages. Covers the headline opportunity, the recommended approach, and the expected ROI.
02
A documented list of every process in scope, with how it actually works today versus how it is described. Includes stakeholder names, time commitments, tools involved, and current pain points.
03
Hours spent per week on each process, loaded labor cost, and the annualized total. Quantified from interviews and observation, not estimated. This is the number you take to budget conversations.
04
Every process scored on impact, effort, complexity, and strategic alignment. Plotted on a matrix so the top-right quadrant (high impact, low effort) is obvious. The matrix is the most-shared artifact of the engagement.
05
A phased plan covering what to automate in what order, with rationale for sequencing. Typically organized into Q1, Q2, Q3 phases with effort and value estimates per phase.
06
For each opportunity, the recommended tool or platform with reasoning. Zapier for one workflow, n8n self-hosted for another, no-automation for a third. Tradeoffs documented so future you can revisit decisions.
07
Build cost, run cost, and rough timeline for the top five automation opportunities. Detailed enough to use as a budget input. If you hire us to build, these estimates become firm proposals.
HOW IT RUNS
A standard audit runs four weeks. Some projects compress to three (smaller scope) or extend to six (multi-department or complex). The biggest concern most buyers have is the time commitment from their own team. We design around that. Most weeks need under three hours of stakeholder time.
WEEK 01
Stakeholder interviews, process observation, tool stack review. We learn how your operations actually work, not just how leadership describes them.
WHAT WE DO
WEEK 02
Quantify time, cost, error rate, and volume for each process. Map dependencies. Identify what is documented versus what is actually happening.
WHAT WE DO
WEEK 03
Score every opportunity against the diagnostic framework. Build the ranking matrix. Draft the recommended roadmap. Estimate build and run costs for top opportunities.
WHAT WE DO
WEEK 04
Finalize the report. Run a live presentation to your leadership team. Answer follow-up questions. Hand over all underlying data and analysis.
WHAT WE DO
4 wks
TYPICAL DURATION
5-10 hrs
TOTAL OF YOUR TIME
40-60 pages
FINAL REPORT
WHAT AUDITS UNCOVER
Anonymized for confidentiality. The shape of the findings is real. Each one came out of an actual audit and changed what the client did next.
FINDING
47% of their automation budget was running Zaps that had not executed in over six months.
CONTEXT
A growth-stage SaaS company had built up about 90 Zaps over three years. Nobody had audited the inventory. Half were abandoned tests, near-duplicates, or workflows for processes that no longer existed. Task usage was high, value was low.
WHAT WE RECOMMENDED
Decommission 38 unused Zaps. Consolidate 12 duplicates into 4. Reduce Zapier plan tier. Annual savings: $14,000. Time to execute: two weeks.
FINDING
The most-painful manual process was not a candidate for automation. It was a candidate for elimination.
CONTEXT
A logistics company was spending 12 hours a week on a reconciliation process between two systems. They wanted us to automate it. We found that the reconciliation existed only because of a data inconsistency that had been patched manually for three years.
WHAT WE RECOMMENDED
Fix the source data issue. The reconciliation process disappears. Estimated effort: three weeks of engineering. Annual time saved: 600 hours. We did not get the automation build, but they hired our partner firm to fix the data layer.
FINDING
Lead routing was the highest-ROI opportunity. Implementation effort was the lowest. They had been ignoring it for two years.
CONTEXT
A real estate firm with 18 agents was distributing inbound leads through a daily manager-led spreadsheet update. Leads were sometimes responded to 36 hours after capture. They had been talking about automating this 'next quarter' for eight quarters.
WHAT WE RECOMMENDED
Build a lead routing automation in HubSpot with round-robin and territory rules. Estimated build time: two weeks. Estimated annual revenue impact from faster response: $340,000. They built it within a month of receiving the report.
FINDING
Three of the six core processes had no documented owner.
CONTEXT
A 50-person company had grown past the point where everyone knew everything. Three critical workflows (vendor onboarding, customer escalation, contract approvals) ran because individuals knew them, not because anyone owned them. If those people left, the workflows would break.
WHAT WE RECOMMENDED
Assign owners and document workflows before automating anything. The automation work is meaningless until ownership is clear. The COO took this finding to the leadership offsite and reorganized accountability.
FINDING
They were paying for three tools that did overlapping work.
CONTEXT
An e-commerce company was running marketing automation in HubSpot, Klaviyo, and Customer.io simultaneously. Each had been bought by a different team at different times. Most workflows ran across all three with manual handoffs. Total spend: $4,800 a month.
WHAT WE RECOMMENDED
Consolidate marketing automation into Klaviyo for transactional and Customer.io for lifecycle. Decommission HubSpot's marketing modules. Annual savings: $32,000. Reduction in cross-tool data sync work: 6 hours weekly.
FINDING
Their CRM data quality was too poor for the automation they wanted to build.
CONTEXT
A B2B company wanted to automate outbound based on intent signals. We found their CRM had 31% duplicate contacts, missing industry data on 40% of accounts, and inconsistent stage definitions across the sales team. The automation they wanted to build would have made the chaos faster.
WHAT WE RECOMMENDED
Three-week CRM cleanup before any automation. Define stages, deduplicate, enrich. Then automate. The cleanup project paid for itself in better forecast accuracy within the quarter.
WHO SHOULD BOOK THIS
Not everyone needs an audit. Some companies should just hire someone and start building. Others need a strategic step first. If any of the five below describe you, the audit will earn its keep.
When there are too many automation candidates to evaluate intuitively, the audit gives you a defensible ranking. Without it, you tend to automate whatever the loudest person wants automated, which is rarely what creates the most value.
This is a common spot. Some Zaps work, some have broken, the bill is creeping up, and nobody is sure if the strategy is sound. An audit gives you the third-party check that either validates the path or quietly recalibrates it.
When the executive team and the operational team disagree, the audit becomes the neutral document that both sides can argue from. We have seen audits resolve standoffs that had been blocking decisions for months.
The audit identifies which opportunities favor each path. Some are best handled by hiring an in-house RevOps person. Some are best handled by an agency. Some are best left manual and not automated at all. We will tell you which is which.
If you have to justify automation spend to a CFO or a board, the audit gives you the quantification and the framework to do so. Specific time-saved numbers, specific revenue impact estimates, specific cost models. The kind of document that survives finance scrutiny.
WHAT HAPPENS AFTER
The audit ends. The question becomes: what do you do with it? Below are the four paths most clients take. We benefit if you hire us for the build, but we also benefit from delivering an audit that you act on regardless of who builds it. Our reputation depends on the report being useful, not on you signing a build contract.
The roadmap becomes a build contract. The recommendations in the report become firm scopes with firm prices. Most clients pick this path because the audit work has built confidence in our judgment. We are happy when this happens but we do not push it.
FREQUENCY
About half of audits
If you have in-house capability or want to hire, the audit gives you everything you need to do it without us. The report is detailed enough that any competent automation engineer can pick it up and ship the work.
FREQUENCY
About a quarter of audits
Sometimes the right path is to hire a regional firm, a specialist, or an existing partner. The audit gives them an unusually detailed brief. We have had clients hand our reports to competitors and we are fine with it. The report is yours to use however you want.
FREQUENCY
Occasional, fine when it happens
Sometimes the audit reveals that the right move is to fix the underlying process, hire instead of automate, change tooling first, or wait until next year. We have written audits that ended with 'do not pursue this right now.' Both you and we are better off knowing that before a build.
FREQUENCY
Rare but not unusual
FAQ
What buyers ask before booking an audit. Click to expand any answer.
READY TO LOOK CAREFULLY
Thirty minutes. Walk us through the territory you want assessed: which department, which workflows, which pain points are driving the conversation. We will tell you whether an audit is the right next step, what it would cost, what your team would need to commit, and what you would get at the end of it.
Book a discovery callNo pressure. Just value.
Hi, I'm Ari 👋
I can help you automate tasks and answer questions about your business.