Operations Audit
See where your operations actually stand.
Ten questions. About ten minutes. Honest benchmarks from operations research across trade industries — patterns that hold for any business. You'll get a score, a tier, and your three highest-leverage gaps — no email required to take it.
Where does your customer information actually live?
Industry data: 94% of FSM software users come from businesses with 1–50 employees, but adoption among the eligible universe is only ~29%. The rest run on memory, sticky notes, and good intentions.
When a new lead calls and we miss it, how fast do we get back to them?
MIT study (HBR): responding within 5 minutes makes you 21x more likely to qualify the lead than responding after 30. 74% of small businesses miss the 5-minute window entirely.
How do you ask customers for reviews after a job?
BrightLocal: 83% of customers asked to leave a review will leave one. The shops winning local search aren't lucky — they're systematic.
When was the last time you logged into your Google Business Profile?
Whitespark 2026: GBP signals account for ~32% of local pack ranking weight. Eight of the top ten local search ranking factors come directly from GBP.
If I ask you your close rate on estimates this month, can you tell me?
Industry benchmark: a contractor with a proper sales motion closes 30-35% of qualified leads. If you don't track it, you can't improve it.
How does a job get assigned, scheduled, and tracked to completion?
FSM-using businesses report a 22% improvement in first-time fix rate and 18% better customer retention vs. manual-process competitors.
If you stepped away for two weeks tomorrow, what would break?
The owner-as-system pattern: if the business can't move without you, that's a design flaw, not a virtue. Top-quartile shops have documented workflows.
How does a customer pay you?
Jobber data (2025): 48% of pros using digital invoicing get paid same-day; ~80% paid within 3 days. Paper-and-check operations carry 30-60 day AR cycles.
When did you last review the financial health of the business in detail?
40% of small businesses are profitable; 30% break even; 30% operate at a loss. The difference correlates with operational visibility, not market type.
When a new hire starts, how do they learn how things work?
Documented workflows are the single biggest predictor of how fast a business can scale past the owner. Every undocumented process is a tax on the owner's time.