The Two-Week Diagnostic
Bring me a question you can’t get a straight answer to.
“Which marketing actually makes us money?” “If we’re growing, why doesn’t the cash show it?” “How are we really doing this month?” — the kind of question you’d expect a straight answer to, and somehow can’t get one.
In two weeks I trace what it takes to answer it — and pin down why your business can’t answer it reliably today.
Fixed price. Two weeks. No hourly meter.
Why you can’t get the answer
Usually it’s one of these.
Every system may be working exactly as designed. The trouble shows up in the space between them — where a real management question has to cross three or four tools that were never built to talk to each other.
- The pieces of the answer live in three or four different systems.
- Two systems define the same word — revenue, lead, customer — differently.
- Someone rebuilds the answer by hand every week in a spreadsheet.
- The history you’d need to compare against is gone or trapped in old software.
- A number management runs on depends on rules that live in one person’s head.
- Two systems flatly disagree, and nobody owns which one is right.
- The question simply can’t be answered with what’s recorded today.
How it works
Two weeks, fixed price.
No hourly meter. Nothing to install or migrate.
Week one
I dig. Read-only access to the systems you already run — nothing to install, nothing to migrate. I trace the numbers management runs on: where they come from, how they’re defined, where they get rebuilt by hand, and which questions your systems can’t answer today.
Week two
You get the readout, walked through together on a one-hour call — a plain-English document, not a slide deck.
If you want it fixed, the build proposal comes straight from the findings — scoped to what the diagnostic actually found.
The deliverable
A plain-English readout you can act on.
- The questions your business can’t currently answer reliably — and why.
- Where the information is scattered, undefined, or rebuilt by hand.
- Where systems or definitions disagree, and what that’s costing you.
- Which problem is worth fixing first.
Questions
What do you need access to?
Read-only looks at the systems you already run — usually an accountant invite to your books, exports from your operating software, and your marketing accounts. Nothing to install, and I never need the ability to change anything.
What if my numbers already agree?
Then that’s one thing off the list — and there’s usually more. Numbers can reconcile and you still can’t answer questions that cross systems, your history is trapped in whatever software you use today, a key metric lives in one person’s spreadsheet, or reporting means rebuilding the same file every week. The readout tells you where you actually stand, either way.
What happens after the readout?
That’s your call. Some owners take the readout and fix things with their own people or vendors. If you want me to build the fix, the proposal comes straight from the findings — scoped to what the diagnostic actually found.
Is this an AI thing?
No. AI is a tool I use where it earns its place, not the offering. The work is connecting the information scattered across your systems into answers you can trust — which, incidentally, is what has to be true before AI or automation can do anything useful for you.