The $2,000 audit fee is real. It's listed on the proposal. It shows up in the contract. And for most of the businesses we end up working with, it's also waived. That looks like a marketing gimmick — “quote the price, then drop it.” It isn't. The fee exists because the audit is real work, and the waiver exists because of how the rest of the engagement gets paid.
Here's the actual logic. Plain version. No fluff.
What the audit actually costs us
An audit isn't a discovery call. It's data work. We pull your actual numbers — call logs, lead records, calendar history, financial statements — and run them against industry benchmarks for your specific vertical. We model your recoverable revenue: how many missed calls turn into lost deals, how many slow lead responses turn into closed-by-competitors, how many no-shows turn into rescheduled appointments that never happen.
That work takes a real chunk of time per engagement. It involves credentialed access to your systems, careful handling of revenue data, and a written deliverable that you can take to a CPA or a partner if you want a second opinion. The $2,000 number isn't arbitrary — it's roughly what the labor and tooling cost us to deliver, with a thin margin on top.
That's the cost basis. Now the waiver.
Who we waive it for
We waive the audit fee for businesses that qualify on the discovery call. Qualifying means three things, all three required:
- You're in the revenue range we work with. Roughly $500K to $5M annually. Below the floor, the math on a performance fee doesn't work for either of us — the dollars we can recover aren't enough to justify our cost of running the engagement. Above the ceiling, the engagement model is different and we'll usually refer you to someone with enterprise-tier infrastructure.
- You're a service business where the phone drives most deals. Home services, medical, legal, financial advisory, real estate. The pattern we automate against — inbound urgency-driven leads, calendar bookings, follow-up sequences — is built for businesses where someone is calling because they need something now.
- You're willing to share real numbers. Read-only access to QuickBooks. Your phone log. Your CRM export. If you can't or won't share these, we can't run the audit. Not because we're nosy — because the entire engagement runs on baseline math, and there's no baseline without numbers.
If you check all three boxes on the call, the audit is free. We pull your data, run the math, and send you a written report within a week. Whether you sign with us afterward is your call — the report is yours either way.
Who we don't
Two categories pay full price. The first: businesses below the revenue floor who want the audit anyway. We won't waive it because we already know the engagement won't make sense — and we won't subsidize a free audit just to pitch you on something we don't believe in. If you want the audit for your own internal use, the price is $2,000 and you'll get a thorough, honest report. But you should probably keep the $2,000.
The second: businesses who want the audit but won't share real data. Maybe you want a generic report on what AI automation could theoretically do for “a business like yours.” That's not what we do. We don't sell hypotheticals. If you can't share the numbers, we can't write a real report — and a real report is the only kind we'll put our name on.
In both cases, paying the $2,000 is allowed. We just don't recommend it.
Why this matters
The audit waiver isn't generosity. It's a filter. Every business that goes through the audit becomes a candidate for a performance-fee engagement — and a performance-fee engagement is how we actually make money. Our incentive is to do the audit only for businesses where we can credibly recover real revenue, because that's the only way the back end of the model works. If we audit you and the recoverable revenue is too small, we won't pitch — and we won't waste your time pretending otherwise.
So if you're in the $500K–$5M range, run a phone-driven service business, and you're willing to share real numbers — the audit is free. That's the deal. If any of those three is missing, you probably shouldn't pay $2,000 for the audit, because we're probably not the right fit. Either way, the call to find out is also free.
