Why We Publish the Audit Price

Scroll through the websites of most firms that build and run things for small businesses and you will notice a small pattern.

There are no prices.

There are service tiers with no numbers. There are “starting at” ranges that trail off into punctuation. There are contact forms that promise “a custom quote tailored to your needs,” which is a polite way of saying “we will decide what to charge you after we have looked at you for a while.”

We do it differently, though not in the way you might expect. We publish one number, and we are deliberate about which one.

What we publish

The Growth and Operations Audit is fifteen hundred dollars, flat. That number is on the page. It does not move based on the size of your business, how the call went, or how much you seem able to pay.

Before that, a fifteen-minute intro call costs nothing. It exists to work out whether we are a fit, not to size up your budget.

The audit ends with a written, ranked plan: what is costing you time and customers, in what order to fix it, and what each fix is worth against what it takes. You keep that plan whether or not you hire us for the work.

If you do move forward, the fifteen hundred is credited toward the approved implementation. It is not a fee stacked on top.

What we do not publish, and why

We do not publish implementation prices, because until we have looked we do not know what your implementation is.

That deserves a straight explanation rather than a shrug, because “it depends” is also what people say when they simply want room to move the number later.

Here is the actual difference. The audit is the same shape every time: the same look at how the business markets and operates, the same ranked plan at the end. A standardized deliverable can carry a standard price, so it does.

Implementation is not the same shape twice. One business needs two tools connected and a broken handoff rewritten. Another needs a new site. Another needs neither and should fix how work gets assigned before spending a dollar on software. Publishing a tier for that would mean padding every quote to cover the worst case, or quietly running over on the ones that turn out harder. The client pays for both of those.

So the split is: the thing we can define in advance gets a public number, and the thing we cannot define until we have looked gets scoped and approved in writing before any work starts. Nobody is asked to approve a number they have not seen.

Why the published number still matters

A price on a page does three things a hidden one cannot.

It saves your time. If fifteen hundred dollars is not what you want to spend right now, you know that in ninety seconds instead of after a week of back-and-forth. You find a better fit. We keep our afternoon.

It is the same for everyone. When nobody can see the number, every number is a negotiation, and the client who pays the most is often the one who trusted the firm the most. A published price is the same for the client who is good at negotiating and the client who is not.

It keeps us honest. A fixed number means we have to know exactly what it covers, because someone is going to pay it and expect the work. There is no room to pad the hours, and if a project is bigger than we can do well, we have to say so up front rather than discovering it in the invoice.

The short version

One published price for the work we can define, and a written, approved scope for the work we cannot define until we have looked at your business.

The audit page has the number and what you get for it. You can book the fifteen-minute call to find out whether it is the right place to start, or send us a question first.