The Strategic Audit, in the open

This is the firm's entry engagement, shown in full before you buy it: what the three weeks contain, who we talk to, what we examine, how we decide, and what you keep. No black box, by design.

The Strategic Audit is where most engagements with Kosek Advisory Group (KAG) begin. It is the firm’s entry engagement, the door in, and the least expensive way to find out whether the way you run the business still fits the business you have built. Because it is the first step you pay for, you should be able to see exactly what it contains before you commit. That is what this page is: the entire process, laid out.

Strategy work has a trust problem. Too much of it is sold as a sealed box. You sign, a team disappears for a few weeks, and a slide deck arrives. We take the opposite position. The method is the product, so we publish the method. If you can read the whole process here and still want it run on your business, the relationship has started on the right footing.

A Strategic Audit is a diagnostic, not an implementation. Over three weeks, time-boxed, we interview the people who do the work, review the documents and systems the business actually runs on, and write two things: a current-state audit and an options memo that lays out the real alternatives with one clear recommendation. You finish with a prioritized 90-day plan and a capability baseline you can measure against later. Everything below is how those three weeks are spent.

In short

What it is. A three-week, time-boxed diagnostic. Structured interviews with the people who do the work, a direct review of your documents and systems, and a written current-state audit paired with an options memo.
What makes it different. Every finding is written down with its source before it becomes a recommendation, and the memo ends with one clear recommendation rather than a menu that hands the decision back to you.
What you keep. A prioritized 90-day plan and a capability baseline you can re-measure later. All of it is yours, whether or not you continue with us.

The map of the process

The whole engagement runs in four stages, in order. Each maps to a section below.

Week one
Structured interviews
Week two
Documents and systems
Week three
The audit and options memo
What you keep
90-day plan and capability baseline

01 / The frame

Why we show you the whole process

Publishing the method costs us a mystique other firms guard. We think that trade is worth making, for three reasons.

It removes the black box. You are buying a defined thing, not a promise. A fixed duration, a fixed scope, and four named deliverables: the current-state audit, the options memo, the prioritized 90-day plan, and the capability baseline. When you can see the shape of the work in advance, the question shifts from “can I trust them” to the more useful one: “is this the right work.”
It sets the standard for the whole relationship. Evidence before recommendation, and one clear call at the end. If that is not how you want decisions made in your business, this is the cheapest possible place to discover it, before either of us has spent much.
It respects your time. An owner who reads this and realizes the friction lives somewhere a three-week diagnostic will not reach can say so before spending a dollar. We would rather lose that engagement than run one that was never going to help.

02 / The boundary

What is fixed before we begin

A diagnostic that runs open-ended stops being a diagnostic and becomes a retainer nobody scoped. The Strategic Audit is bounded on purpose. Four things are settled before the first interview.

Duration: Three weeks, with a fixed start and end date agreed before we begin. The time-box is part of the discipline: it forces us to find the signal that matters rather than examine everything.
Scope: Agreed in the free consultation, in writing: which parts of the business are in, and which are out. You will not be charged for a widening scope you did not approve.
What you buy: Four named artifacts: a written current-state audit, an options memo with one recommendation, a prioritized 90-day plan, and a capability baseline. All named before we start, so “done” is not a matter of opinion.
What it is not: Not a forensic financial audit, a legal or compliance review, or an implementation. If we see something in that territory, we flag it plainly and point you to the right specialist. We will not pretend the audit is one.

03 / Week one

Structured interviews with the people who do the work

Week one is listening. The friction in a growing business usually lives in the gap between how the business is described at the top and how it actually runs day to day. You surface that gap by talking to the people standing in it. Interviews are one-on-one and confidential, so people speak plainly, and they run off a shared core of questions adapted per role, so answers can be compared across seats rather than collected as anecdotes.

We talk to the people who do the work, not only the people who describe it. A typical audit covers four kinds of seats.

The owner

What does the business need to do reliably in two years that it cannot do reliably today?
Which decisions could route through your team instead of through you, and what happens when you are away?
Where do you spend time on work your team could carry, freeing you for the work only you can do?
If you could fix one handoff permanently, which one would buy back the most peace?

Managers and team leads

What slows your team down that has nothing to do with how hard people are working?
Which decision takes too long, and who actually owns it when it stalls?
What do you route around instead of through, and why?
What would you change first if this part of the business were yours to run?

The people who do the work

Walk me through a normal day, and stop at each point where it snags.
What information do you go hunting for that a system could put in front of you?
Where does a task reach you half-finished, and who do you have to chase to close it?
What have you stopped raising because raising it never changed anything?

Finance and back office

Where does the month-end close slow down, and what causes the delay each time?
Which numbers do you not fully trust, and what do you reconcile by hand to compensate?
Where has a spreadsheet quietly taken over a job a system could carry?

The questions are specific on purpose. When an answer comes back vague, that vagueness is itself a signal: it usually marks a place where no one owns the outcome, which is often the first real finding.

04 / Week two

A direct review of documents and systems

Week two tests what the interviews described against what the business actually produces. Words describe intent; documents and systems record behavior. We read both, then compare them.

Documents we examine

The organizational chart as drawn, compared against how work and authority actually move.
Any standard operating procedures (SOPs) that exist, and the places where none do.
A representative sample of what the core workflow produces: quotes, invoices, work orders, onboarding checklists.
Profit and loss (P&L) structure at the level needed to see where margin and hours actually go. A diagnostic read, not a forensic one.
The handful of contracts and vendor agreements that shape how the work runs.
Whatever metrics or dashboards the team already watches, and the ones they wish they had.

Systems we examine

The tools that run the core workflow: accounting, customer relationship management (CRM), scheduling or job management, and communication.
How those tools connect, and the seams where they do not.
Where data is re-keyed by hand from one system into another.
Where a spreadsheet has quietly become critical infrastructure that only one person understands.

The evidence rule

Nothing becomes a recommendation until it is written down as a finding with its source attached. A finding is an observation with a citation, an interview, a document, a number, a screen, not an opinion. That rule is why the final options memo can be traced line by line back to something specific. You get to see the reasoning, not only the conclusion.

Then we reconcile. Where the interviews and the records agree, a finding is confirmed. Where they disagree, that gap is a finding of its own, and it is often the more useful one, because it marks the distance between how the business believes it operates and how it does.

05 / Week three

The audit, the options memo, and one recommendation

Week three turns two weeks of evidence into two written documents you can act on: the current-state audit and the options memo.

The current-state audit

A written document organized around where friction concentrates in your business, not around our internal categories. Each finding states three things: what we observed, the evidence behind it, and why it costs the business time, money, or risk. It is written for the owner to read and use, not for a consultant to admire.

The options memo

For each decision that matters, the genuine alternatives, including the option to change nothing. For each alternative, the honest cost in money, time, and disruption, and the trade-off you would actually be making. We do not bury the hard choice or pad the memo with options we would not choose ourselves.

The one-recommendation discipline

After the options are laid out fairly, we make a single call. Not a ranked list of five that quietly hands the decision back to you. One recommendation, the reasoning behind it, our confidence in it, and the specific thing that would change our mind.

The reason is simple. You did not commission a diagnostic in order to be handed the decision back with a bow on it. A menu of options moves the cost of choosing onto you, which is the part you were paying to offload. A single recommendation is accountable and testable in a way a menu never is. You remain free to override it, and sometimes the override is the right call, but a real position gives you something concrete to override, not a shrug to pick from.

06 / The handover

What you keep

The current-state audit and the options memo explain where the business stands and what to decide. Two more deliverables, the prioritized 90-day plan and the capability baseline, make it something you can run.

The prioritized 90-day plan

The specific moves, sequenced by leverage rather than by ease, with the first thirty days concrete enough to start the Monday after we finish. Each item carries an owner, a rough sense of effort, and the outcome it is meant to produce. The plan is deliberately short. A list of forty things is a way of avoiding a decision about the first three.

The capability baseline

A written snapshot of where the business stands today across everything we examined, in terms you can re-measure. Six months on, you can see whether the needle moved against your own starting point, rather than against a generic industry benchmark that may not fit a business built the way yours is.

All four artifacts, the current-state audit, the options memo, the prioritized 90-day plan, and the capability baseline, are delivered to you and are yours to keep, whether or not you take a next step with us. We do not hold the analysis back to pressure a follow-on sale. A Strategic Audit that ends with a plan you run yourself is a Strategic Audit that did its job.

07 / The signature

Who stands behind the work

The Strategic Audit is run by a person, not a template. Brian Kosek is an Industrial and Organizational (I/O) Psychology practitioner, the field concerned with how people, roles, and systems actually perform inside an organization. He holds the Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR) and Professional in Human Resources (PHR) certifications and a PROSCI Change Management certification, and he brings more than fifteen years leading enterprise workforce transformation to work sized for an owner-run business.

That background sets the standard the process holds. Measurement-science training is the reason findings are tied to evidence before they become recommendations, and change-management practice is the reason the 90-day plan is built to be adopted rather than admired.

AI in the work, a person on the signature

Artificial intelligence (AI) is what lets three weeks cover every transcript, document and system export rather than a sample of them, which is most of why a diagnostic this thorough fits inside a fixed scope at all. It does not sign anything. A credentialed practitioner sets the judgment and puts a name to the recommendation you receive. Where that line falls in general, across every engagement rather than this one, is set out on the approach page.

08 / The path

Where the audit sits, and what comes after

Working with us runs in three steps, in this order. It opens with a free consultation: a conversation, not a pitch, where we decide together whether we can genuinely help. The Strategic Audit is the second step and the first one you pay for, the current-state analysis that turns that conversation into evidence. If the audit points to work worth doing, implementation is the third, scoped as a fixed engagement or an ongoing retainer and run alongside your team.

You are never obligated to continue past the audit. Many of the most useful ones end with a plan the owner runs without us. That is a fine outcome, and often the honest one.

Step 1
Free consultation
No charge, and a conversation rather than a pitch. We decide together whether we can genuinely help.
Step 2
Strategic Audit
This page, and the first step you pay for: the bounded, current-state analysis described above.
You are here
Step 3
Implementation
Optional, and only if the audit points to work worth doing. Scoped as a fixed engagement or an ongoing retainer.

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