WHAT SHOULD AN AUDIT
ACTUALLY FIND?

MOST THINGS CALLED AN AUDIT
ARE A SALES CALL.

The format is familiar. Ninety minutes, a lot of questions, a slide deck a week later, and a recommendation that happens to match what the firm sells. It is free because it is marketing, and owners in industrial markets can usually tell within the first twenty minutes.

The test is simple and worth applying before you pay anyone: could you act on the output without us? If the findings only make sense as an argument for hiring the firm that produced them, it was not an audit.

WHAT IT SHOULD
COVER.

Breadth matters more than depth at this stage, because the expensive problem is rarely the one the owner called about. TMI works through ten areas, each scored against a written rubric so the result does not depend on who ran it.

Underneath all of them sits one question that almost nobody asks: what does this company know that other companies do not?

WHAT IT SHOULD
PRODUCE.

Four things, and you should expect all four in writing.

Three, not twenty. A list of twenty recommendations is a way of avoiding the judgment the owner is paying for.

WHAT TO REFUSE.
ALL OF IT.

Invented numbers. If a report says you will save forty percent, ask where the forty came from. Hours should be arithmetic on figures you supplied — the task, who does it, how often, how long — and anything not captured should say so rather than being estimated into existence.

A projected return before any work has been done. Nobody can know it, so any number offered is a sales instrument.

Another client’s name as proof. A firm that will name its clients to you will name you to the next one.

If the audit is free, you are not the client. You are the pipeline.

WHAT IT SHOULD COST,
AND WHY THAT HELPS.

Paying for the audit changes what it is. It can go wider, it can go into the systems and the records rather than taking your word for them, and the output belongs to you — including if you hand it to a different firm to execute. TMI charges $5,000 and the conversation before it costs nothing.

The audit that honestly concludes you need very little is worth more to everyone than a project someone was talked into.

COMMON QUESTIONS

How long should an audit take?

Long enough to cover the ground and short enough that the owner stays in the room. What matters more is whether the person running it has been inside operations like yours, and whether the findings are specific to your company or could be pasted into anyone's report.

Who should be in the room?

The owner, and whoever actually knows how the work moves. That second person is often an operations manager or a long-serving scheduler, and they are frequently the most useful voice there.

What if we already had an assessment done?

Bring it. If it is recent and credible, a good firm will work from it rather than charging you to rediscover the same findings.

Does an audit obligate us to anything?

It should not. TMI's roadmap is written so that another firm could execute it, and plenty of companies do exactly that or execute it themselves.