First audit call done! · AI Automation Agency Hub

First audit call done!

Just over an hour on video, recorded, with his store admin open on screen. I went in with a list of numbers I wasn't allowed to leave without. I also went in with a favourite answer, and that turned out to be the problem.

After discovery I was sure the bottleneck was content. He'd told me he had loads of footage that never got published, so I'd basically written the report in my head: a system to get the backlog out.

So I asked him to walk me through the last clip he'd filmed that never got posted. He thought about it and said there isn't one. Everything he films goes up. Idea to published takes him about 20–30 minutes, and he edits it without friction. The real issue sits earlier. Nothing tells him what to film or when, and all his raw material lives unsorted in his camera roll. He isn't stuck on publishing. He's stuck on starting.

The second surprise was bigger. In discovery he'd said he wanted to spend less time chasing retailers, so I'd put retail outreach under "not recommending." Then we talked about what would actually let him go full-time, and almost all of that math ran through winning new stores. The thing I'd written off moved to the top of my list. He's already half-built his outreach with AI, but he still sends every email by hand, and he dropped his daily target the day after he set it.

Third: the business can't see its own split between online and wholesale. Wholesale invoices live in a different system from the shop, so the split is his best guess. He works with business processes in his day job. His own words about his own company: "we run on paper." I don't see that as a criticism. I think it's the most common pattern there is, because expertise doesn't carry over into your own business when you have no time left for it.

The finding I was proudest of, a technical email problem I'd verified before the call, he parked. Not a priority right now. That's fair. Pushing it would have been about me, not him.

I also told him I'm still in school. Nothing changed.

What I got wrong

I was too attached to my discovery hypothesis. If I'd presented it instead of testing it, I'd be building the wrong thing right now.
I took "I want less of this" at face value in discovery, without asking what goal that work was serving.
I ran over the hour. I had a time plan with timestamps and didn't hold it.
I didn't book the follow-up before we hung up. My own script says to. He said "reach out next week" and I let it go.
Some of my numbers are estimates, not counts, because the data is spread across two systems. I should have asked earlier which numbers he could actually open.

What you can take from this

Ask for the counterexample. "Walk me through one that got stuck" killed my hypothesis in one question. If they can't give you one, you've learned more than you would from any yes.
Ask what the goal is before you rank anything. "I want less of this" and "this is how I hit my goal" can describe the same task.
Check whether a number exists before you ask for it. If the data is split across systems, the split is itself a finding.
Let them park things. A good finding they aren't ready for isn't lost. It's your next conversation.
Guard the last ten minutes. Write the hard stop at the top of your notes. Use the final ten minutes for the summary and for booking the next meeting, whatever else is left unfinished.

What's next for me

Writing the report, built around what he actually said rather than what I expected him to say. Every number is marked as counted or estimated. Each recommendation gets a confidence rating, and there's a section on what I'm not recommending and why. There'll be a long version he keeps and a shorter version I present, on a 30-minute call to walk him through it.

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First audit call done!