The audit is the most abused product in consulting. It is sold as a diagnosis and delivered as a pitch: forty pages that all conclude the seller should be hired for the next phase. Buyers know this, which is why the word itself has gone soft.
We have delivered diagnostic work across 88 engagements since 2018, and the pattern that separates a real audit from a dressed-up proposal has held the whole time. A real audit can hurt its own seller.
The conflict test #
Ask one question before you buy any audit: can this document conclude that you should not hire the auditor? If every possible finding leads to the same recommendation, you are not buying a diagnosis, you are buying a preamble.
Ours can and does. A scored problem map sometimes says the constraint is operational, or capital, or timing, and none of those are things we sell. Roughly a third of our diagnostic engagements end without a follow-on, and that is the product working, not failing. The buyer got a decision. That was the deal.
What the artefact has to contain #
A diagnosis you cannot act on without the diagnoser is a hostage note. The artefact standard we hold: findings scored against evidence rather than opinion, ranked by commercial return rather than by how interesting they are to fix, and a recommendation runway written so that your own team, or any supplier you rate, can run it.
That last clause matters most. Since 2018 the test we apply before an audit ships is the handover test: could a competent stranger execute this document? If the answer is no, the document is not finished.
Why it is priced where it is #
From $5,000, fixed, inside two weeks. Priced low enough that a leadership team can buy it without a procurement cycle, high enough that both sides take it seriously, and fixed because hourly billing pays the auditor to be slow.
Ten of the fourteen firms in our competitive benchmark publish no prices at all. We publish ours because a buyer who cannot see the price assumes, usually correctly, that the price depends on what the seller thinks they can pay.
An audit is worth $5,000 when it ends in a decision you were avoiding. It is worth nothing, at any price, when it ends in a proposal you expected.