The audit before the build: a two-week checklist.

Every PYJ engagement starts with a two-week audit. We don't propose a build before we've finished the audit, because half the time the build the operator thinks they need is not the one that moves the most money.

The audit is a single shared sheet with twelve rows. Each row maps to a part of the business that, in our experience, is where service operators bleed money or time. The columns are: leak description, monthly £ cost (high/low confidence), proposed build, build cost (rough), payback weeks.

The twelve rows are: enquiry response time, no-show rate, rebook latency, deposit handling, channel fragmentation, stock or inventory drift, supplier price drift, payroll and rota visibility, P&L latency, owner admin hours per week, knowledge handoff to new staff, and compliance certificate expiry coverage.

We sit with the owner for two two-hour sessions. We then spend a week with the actual data — Stripe exports, the booking platform, the email account, the SOP folder, the WhatsApp threads with staff. We populate every row. Then we sit again, walk through it, and rank.

By the end of week two, the operator has a sheet that explains where every leaky £100 of margin is going. Sometimes that sheet is the deliverable. We've had clients take the audit, hand the build to their internal team, and not engage us further. That's a good outcome.

The audit costs £6,800 fixed price. If we go on to the build, that fee is credited against the build price. If we don't, we don't. The conflict of interest is structural; the only way to remove it is to charge for the audit on its own terms.