Every Opsist partnership starts with an Ops Audit. The phrase is used loosely across the industry, so it is worth being precise about what this one is and is not. It is not a strategy workshop, a benchmarking report or a sales call with a checklist. It is a structured review of how a business actually operates, conducted by people who will be accountable for running parts of it afterwards, and it ends in a written plan.
The five workflows
What the audit reviews
- 01
Finance and cash
How money comes in and goes out: invoicing, collections, payables, payroll, approvals, bank reconciliation, the close, and who can move cash alone.
- 02
People
How the business hires, onboards, pays, reviews and exits people; where role definitions exist; which roles are single points of failure.
- 03
Customer
How a lead becomes a customer and a customer stays one: pipeline, pricing discipline, onboarding, service, escalation and churn.
- 04
Systems and data
Which systems hold which records, how they connect, who has access, what is still on paper or in spreadsheets, and where the same fact lives in two places.
- 05
Reporting and cadence
What numbers are produced, on what schedule, by whom, and whether management decisions are actually made from them.
For each workflow the audit asks the same three questions. How does this work today, as observed rather than as described? Where does it depend on one person's memory or intervention? What would a lender, investor or acquirer conclude about it? The gap between the first answer and the third is the audit's finding.
What it asks for
The document list is deliberately short: the last two years of financial statements and the current year to date, the chart of accounts, an organisation chart with roles, the customer list with revenue by customer, the vendor list with spend, a list of systems in use, and any existing process documents. Beyond documents, the audit needs read access to the accounting system and the main operating system for two weeks, and conversations with the founder and the people who actually do the work in each of the five areas.
What it produces
The output is a written document with four parts. First, a description of each workflow as it operates today, in enough detail that the founder recognises it. Second, a findings list: dependencies, control gaps, reporting gaps and manual work, each rated by risk and by the cost of leaving it alone. Third, a sequenced plan: what changes first, what changes next, who owns each change, and what the business should expect to see by month three, six and twelve. Fourth, a clear statement of what Opsist would own under a partnership, what it would not, and on what terms.
The sequencing is the most important part. Almost every founder-led business has the same twenty problems. The value is in knowing which three to fix first, and those are almost always in finance and cash, because nothing else can be measured until the numbers are trusted. The operating cadence note explains why.
Fit runs both ways
The audit is also how Opsist decides whether to propose a partnership, and how a founder decides whether to accept one. Opsist works with businesses of a particular shape: founder-led, past the survival stage, with an economic engine that works and an operating layer that has not kept up. A business that is not that shape will be told so. A founder who is not ready to have functions owned by someone else, on a written scope with shared visibility, should say so.
The How It Works page describes what follows an audit when both sides proceed. The audit itself stands on its own: a founder who receives one and does nothing else with Opsist still has a written picture of how the business runs and a sequenced list of what to fix. That is the standard it is held to. To begin one, apply here.