Jun 12, 2026
Most growth audits are sales pitches wearing a diagnosis costume. You get a template, ten screenshots of your website with red arrows, and a quote on the last slide.
That's not an audit. That's a proposal with extra steps.
A real growth audit answers one question: what is actually capping your growth, and what is fixing it worth? Everything else is decoration.
I run these for founders and SME owners, so I'll show you exactly what mine contains. Not because you need me to do it — you can run most of this yourself — but because once you've seen a real one, you'll never accept the screenshot deck again.
Quick distinction, because the terms get blended.
A marketing audit reviews your channels: ads, content, email, SEO. It assumes the problem is how you're promoting.
A growth audit reviews the business: what you sell, to whom, at what price, through what funnel, kept for how long. Marketing is one room in that house. Most stalled companies I look at don't have a marketing problem — they have a positioning or pricing problem that marketing spend was hired to hide.
If someone audits your ads before they've asked what you charge and why, you're getting the wrong audit.
Every memo I write has the same skeleton. Four sections, in this order, because each one depends on the one before it.
Who is this for, why does it win, and what should it cost?
This section forces the uncomfortable questions first. Can your customers repeat your positioning back to you? Not your tagline — the actual reason they picked you. If five customers give five different answers, that's the constraint, and no funnel work matters until it's fixed.
Pricing lives here too, because pricing is positioning expressed in a number. Most of the underpricing I find wasn't calculated. It was set by fear, years ago, and never revisited.
Where do leads leak, and where do deals quietly stall?
Not "is the funnel optimized" — funnels are never optimized. The question is where the one big leak is. There's almost always one step losing more than all the others combined: the demo that doesn't convert, the trial that never activates, the proposal that goes quiet.
This section ends with funnel math, in digits. Sessions, conversions, close rate, revenue per lead. If you can't write that line for your own business, that itself is a finding.
What keeps customers, and what protects margin?
Acquisition gets the attention; retention pays the bills. A business that loses customers as fast as it wins them doesn't have a growth problem — it has a leaky bucket wearing a growth problem's clothes. I look at why the customers who stayed actually stayed, and what the operation spends to serve them.
Where does AI genuinely pay in this business — and where is it theater?
I put this lens last on purpose. I've spent years building AI products and trained over 15,000 engineers in AI, and the honest answer for most businesses is: AI is a multiplier on a working strategy, not a replacement for one. This section names the two or three places where automation has a real payback in your operation, and explicitly lists what to skip.
A written memo. Findings, the constraint, what fixing it is worth, and what I'd do in your seat for the next 90 days — in priority order, including what not to do. The skip-list is usually the most valuable page.
Notice what's missing: no tool recommendations, no retainer pitch in the middle, no "phase 2 scoping call" required to see the findings.
One real example of why order matters. A client's dashboard product had been built feature-by-feature off years of individual customer requests. The instinct was to keep patching. The audit-shaped question — how is this actually used, and by whom? — pointed somewhere else entirely: research the real usage first, then rebuild from the ground up. The patch budget would have been spent making the wrong thing slightly better.
That's what an audit is for. Not finding more things to do. Finding the one thing that changes what everything else is worth.
Three tests:
I run a small number of these audits free every month — written memo in 7 days, no pitch at the end. Most end with a roadmap the team executes themselves. Some become partnerships. Either is a good outcome.
Want this run on your product? Tell me what you've built →