The Operations Diagnostic

The diagnostic costs less than one month of the headcount tax.

The Operations Diagnostic is a no pitch, fully mapped audit of every system, every handoff, and every leak in the operating environment. Clients can walk away with the report alone, and most do not, because by week 4 the math on what to do next has already written itself.

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Why You Are Reading This

You already know something is leaking. You just cannot price it.

Pick the line that sounds most like your operating environment. We have heard each of these on intake calls more times than we can count.

"We have 14 SaaS subscriptions and nobody can tell me which ones we actually use."

"Our team is the integration layer between three systems that should talk to each other."

"We just hired our fourth ops coordinator this year. The work is not getting smaller."

"AR aging keeps drifting and nobody can tell me where the bottleneck actually lives."

"My finance team builds the same monthly report from scratch every cycle."

"Three vendors have pitched me AI. I have no way to evaluate which is real."

What You Get

Four deliverables. No fluff.

Every diagnostic ships the same package, scoped to your operation.

Full Stack Inventory

Every license, every seat, every integration, every manual handoff. Tied to actual usage, not the contract list. We surface what you pay for and never use, what you use and pay too much for, and what you should be using and are not.

Workflow Leakage Audit

Sales to cash, procure to pay, and the operational workflows specific to your business. We shadow the work, map every handoff, and quantify where time and revenue are leaving the system.

Headcount Tax Calculation

The hours per week your team spends on work the systems should be doing, multiplied by actual blended labor cost. Most mid-market companies are paying a six figure annual headcount tax and have never put a number on it.

Phased Recovery Plan

A 90, 180, and 365 day plan with ROI math your audit committee can review. Each phase has a fixed scope, a fixed price range, and a defined exit criterion so nobody is committing to a multi year program on a hope.

The Schedule

Four weeks. Defined work product each week.

You always know what is happening, what is being delivered, and who is doing it.

Week 1

Stack inventory and stakeholder interviews. Read-only access to your billing, your CRM, your ERP, and your file systems. Forty-five minute interviews with each operating leader.

Week 2

Workflow shadowing and leakage audit. We sit beside your operators while they work and time the friction. The number of hours lost to swivel chair integration is almost always larger than the executive estimate.

Week 3

Math model and peer comparison. Headcount tax calculation, integration tax calculation, and benchmark comparison against operating peers in your sector and revenue band.

Week 4

Plan delivery and executive review. A 90 minute working session with the leadership team. We walk the plan, defend the math, and answer the audit committee questions before anyone has to ask them.

Fixed Fee

$5,500. Flat. Paid up front.

The diagnostic is not a free service, and that is on purpose. The price keeps tire kickers out and signals serious intent on both sides. Five thousand five hundred dollars buys you four weeks of senior operator time, a 40 to 50 page written report, an ROI model your finance team can pressure test, and a working session with the principal who built the methodology.

If you walk away with the report and never engage us again, that is a clean outcome. The report stands on its own. Many clients do exactly that, take the plan to their internal team, and execute it themselves. We are fine with that. We built the diagnostic to be useful as a standalone work product, not as a sales funnel disguised as a discovery call.

The Math

Run the numbers before you sign.

Mid-market integration tax: $320,000 per year is the typical run rate we surface in companies between $20M and $250M in revenue. Some come in lower. Many come in higher. Almost nobody calculates it before we walk in.

Diagnostic fee: $5,500 fixed.

Net effect: if the recommendations are followed, the diagnostic returns its cost in the first 18 hours of recovered capacity. The other 364 days of the year are upside.

Reference Build

What this looks like at scale.

California's largest hillside structural engineering firm sat for the diagnostic after walking away from an 85 percent complete Salesforce migration. The audit surfaced roughly $300,000 in projected annual capacity recovery across three workflow tiers: project knowledge retrieval, jobsite documentation processing, and finance handoffs into QuickBooks Time. Each tier had a phase price, a scope, and a defined exit criterion.

Phase 1 ran $30,000 and recovered roughly 80 hours per week of capacity inside six weeks of go-live. The diagnostic paid for itself the morning the first agentic workflow went into production. The remainder of the recovered capacity continues to compound.

Read the Case Study

The Deliverables

What you walk away with on day 30.

The Report

40 to 50 pages. Written for executives, not for procurement. Includes findings, recommendations, and the math behind each.

The ROI Model

A spreadsheet your finance team can take apart, line by line, and pressure test against your own operating numbers.

The Phased Plan

90, 180, and 365 day milestones. Each phase has a fixed scope, a price range, an exit criterion, and a do-nothing alternative.

The Working Session

A 90 minute executive review where we walk the plan, answer questions, and defend the math in front of the leadership team.

Boundaries

What this is not.

The diagnostic is not a sales pretext. We do not sell you Salesforce. We do not push you to migrate anything. We do not make you sign a follow-on engagement to keep the report. We do not charge by the hour, which means there is no incentive to drag the work out. The fee is fixed, the schedule is fixed, and the deliverable is yours.

We also do not pretend to be vendor neutral when we are not. If a part of the recovery plan involves software we build, we say so, in writing, with the alternative options listed beside it so you can decide. The point is for you to make a sound decision with your eyes open, not to manufacture a sale.

If You Do Engage Us

Every build phase begins with a Proof of Concept.

If you decide to move forward with one of the recovery phases, the first step is always a Proof of Concept against your real data. We do not ask for production budget on a hope. We build the riskiest piece first, run it against your actual workflow, and either it works or we do not move forward. You decide.

The diagnostic is the first gate. The POC is the second gate. By the time anyone is committing real production budget, two independent rounds of evidence have already been collected. That is how you avoid the 60 percent transformation project failure rate that the industry quietly reports.

Book the diagnostic.

Twenty minutes on the phone first if you want to talk it through, or go straight to the inquiry form if you have already done the math in your head.