- business
- clients
- audit
Every time I take on a new project, the same thing happens. I spend the first day or two going through everything they already have, and I find things they did not know about.
Not small things. Things like a store still selling tickets to events that happened two years ago, because the platform has no concept of an event date and the year was only printed on the poster artwork. Things like a contact form that has been quietly failing. Domains printed on their own marketing that no longer resolve. Analytics that were never installed. A checkout that breaks on iOS.
That is the most valuable work I do, it takes the least time, and for years I did it for free as part of "having a chat".
Why the audit outperforms the build
The build is a promise. The audit is a fact.
When you tell someone what you are going to make, you are asking them to trust an outcome they cannot verify. When you tell them what is currently broken, you have already delivered something. They can go and look. The proof arrives before the invoice, which inverts the entire trust problem of getting hired.
It also reframes the conversation permanently. You are no longer a vendor pitching a service against three other vendors pitching the same service. You are the person who found the thing.
What to actually check
Most of it is unglamorous and takes minutes:
- Try to buy the thing. Actually complete a purchase. This finds more than any automated tool.
- Submit the contact form and see whether the email arrives.
- Open everything on a phone, on mobile data, not on the office wifi.
- Click every link in the footer. Footers rot faster than anything else.
- Look at the artwork, not just the text. Listing copy routinely omits what the image plainly states.
- Search their own brand name and see what actually ranks.
- Check what happens to a URL that does not exist.
None of that requires access to anything. All of it can be done before a contract exists.
Read the images
That is the one I would emphasise, because it is where the best findings come from and almost nobody does it.
Automated tools read text. Humans skim text and look at pictures. So the mistakes hide in the pictures — the poster with the year on it, the screenshot showing an old price, the banner advertising a promotion that ended, the photo with a competitor's product in it.
Nothing crawls that. You have to look.
Charge for it
The obvious objection is that giving away the audit is how you win the work. It is not. It is how you win some of the work, and it is how you spend a lot of unpaid days on people who were never going to hire you.
Sell the audit as a small, fixed, fast piece of work with a written deliverable. If they take the findings and fix them alone, you got paid and they got value. If they hire you for the build, it comes off the price.
Either way you stop doing the highest-value part of your job for nothing.
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