AHA Audits · Rung 01 · the front door
The alchemist grades the base material before anything gets transmuted. Ours grades your business the same way: five stages, scored findings, a recommendation runway, and a problem map your team works from on Monday.
What gets audited
Every Audit runs in one of the three pillars, or as a cross-pillar scan of the whole operation. The scope you picked shapes the sample; the method never changes.
The instrument
The Grading is the same instrument every time: evidence in, grades out, decisions held. It is why two Audits in two different industries produce the same kind of clarity.
Grade the material before you transmute it.
Access and intake. We take a true sample of the business: the systems, the numbers, the market-facing surfaces, and the one-sentence test run across your own team. No workshops, no theatre. Evidence in, opinions out.
The evidence pass. Each pillar in scope is tested against the AHA standard: position against category, funnel against real numbers, stack against systems we run in production. The cross-pillar seams get the same scrutiny.
Findings are scored, not listed. Every finding carries a grade, a commercial weight, and the evidence behind it, so the leadership team argues about what to do, not whether it is true.
The prioritised problem map. What to fix first, what each fix costs, what it returns, and what depends on it. The order is the deliverable; a list of problems without a sequence is just anxiety.
One executive session with the people who own the outcome. The findings walked through, the recommendations sequenced into a runway, the first move decided in the room, and the map handed over in a form your team works from on Monday.
Why it matters
Most growth-stage businesses are spending real money compensating for an undiagnosed problem: marketing volume over a positioning debt, new hires over missing systems, AI pilots over disconnected data.
A $5,000 diagnosis routinely cancels six figures of misdirected spend. The Audit pays for itself the first time it kills a project that was never going to work.
Scored findings settle arguments that opinions never will. The leadership team leaves the session agreeing on what is true, which is the expensive part of any transformation.
Whatever you do next (a Sprint, a Roadmap, an internal push) starts from evidence instead of instinct. And a portion of the Audit is credited if you climb within 30 days.
What you walk away with
Nothing arrives as a deck to admire. Each artefact is built to enter the workflow your team already runs.
Every finding graded, weighted and evidenced. The argument settled on paper.
One page: what is blocking growth, ranked, priced and sequenced.
Every recommendation sequenced, walked through in a working session with the people who own the outcome. Decisions get made in it.
The top fix scoped tightly enough to start the same week.
Scope confirmed from your selections, access granted to the systems and numbers in scope. Half a day of your team's time, total.
Stages 01–04 run through the first week and a half. Your team keeps operating; we work from the evidence, with one or two short calls where the evidence needs a human.
Stage 05: the Recommendation Runway, walked through with owners in the room. Each finding leaves with a name against it, and the first move is decided before the session ends.
The problem map becomes the operating agenda: fixes enter sprints and pipelines your team already runs. If the next step is a Sprint or Roadmap, a portion of the Audit fee is credited within 30 days.
Before you book
Sometimes the Audit finds that the problem is not the one we were hired to look at, or that the fix is cheaper and less interesting than a program of work. You will be told that plainly and in writing. We would rather lose the engagement that follows than sell you one you do not need.
Scope stops where the evidence stops. Where the Grading cannot support a recommendation it says so, rather than filling the gap with an opinion, and anything outside the agreed scope is quoted before it starts, never after.
Book an Audit
Audits run up to two weeks and start from $5,000 AUD ex-GST; cross-pillar scans quote higher after a short scoping call. One slot opens at a time, because the same senior judgement runs every Grading.
Prefer to talk first? Start an enquiry or see how we work.