The Operations Audit  ·  Fixed Scope  ·  Two Weeks

You already know something is breaking. This tells you what, how bad, and what to do first.

Two weeks. One flat fee. At the end you hold a ranked list of every operational and compliance risk in your organization, rated by severity, with a 90 day fix plan and a named owner on every line.

$1,850Flat · No retainer required
Two week turnaround $925 credited if you engage after

Thirty minute call first. No pitch, no pressure. If the audit is not what you need, you will hear that from me.

Why this exists

Most organizations do not have an operations problem. They have a visibility problem.

You feel it in the week. The scramble before the board meeting. The one staffer who knows the CACFP rules. The site that opened a little differently than the last four. None of that is a mystery to the people doing the work. It is just never written down in one place, ranked, and put in front of the person who can fix it.

What usually happens
  • Problems get named in a meeting and then absorbed back into the week
  • Everyone has an opinion on the top priority and no two agree
  • You find out about a compliance gap when the monitor does
  • The board asks what is wrong and the honest answer is a list of ten things in no order
What this replaces it with
  • Every risk written down, rated, and sequenced
  • One priority order the whole leadership team can see
  • Gaps surfaced before an auditor gets to them
  • A document you can hand your board that answers the question
What is included

Five systems reviewed. One document at the end.

The same five areas that break most nonprofits, worked one at a time against what your organization actually does, not against a generic checklist.

Growth and scaling

Replication model, site launch consistency, SOP coverage, and where a lean team is carrying process in their heads.

Compliance and audits

CACFP, SFSP, and federal review readiness. Documentation trail, monitoring calendar, partner site consistency, single point of failure risk.

Staff capacity

Who owns what, where the work is stacked, onboarding gaps, and the functions that stop cold when one person is out.

Governance and reporting

Board reporting cadence, whether the numbers connect to operations, and whether the board can actually govern from what they get.

Crisis readiness

Continuity plan, command structure, and how many days you could operate through a funding shock or a storm.

You keep
  • Ranked findings report with severity ratings
  • 90 day fix plan, sequenced, with named owners
  • One page board summary you can hand over as is
  • 60 minute findings session with you and your team
The two weeks

Fourteen days. You know what happens on each one.

Nothing here is open ended. That is the point. Fixed scope, fixed price, fixed end date.

Days 1 and 2
Intake and document request

One kickoff call with you. A single document request list goes out. Org chart, SOPs if they exist, last monitoring or audit correspondence, board packet, program numbers. If a document does not exist, that is already a finding.

Days 3 through 6
Interviews

Up to five conversations with the people who run the work. Thirty minutes each, remote. Program lead, compliance, finance, and whoever your team says is the one who knows everything. That last one is usually where the risk lives.

Days 7 through 10
Analysis and rating

Findings get written, rated by severity and by cost of doing nothing, and sequenced. Sequencing matters more than the list. Fixing things in the wrong order is how most improvement plans die in month two.

Days 11 through 13
The plan

The 90 day fix plan gets built. Every item has an owner, a due date, and a definition of done. Written to be run by your team, not by me.

Day 14
Findings session and handoff

Sixty minutes. Walk the findings, walk the plan, answer the hard questions in the room. Board chair welcome. Then the documents are yours, and you can run the plan yourself or bring me in to run it with you.

Fit

This is not for everybody.

Right fit
  • Human services or food security nonprofit between $1M and $10M
  • Federal money on the books and no one who clearly owns compliance
  • Programs that grew faster than the systems underneath them
  • An ED doing the COO job on top of the ED job
  • A new ED inside the first year who needs the real picture fast
  • A board that has started asking questions you cannot answer with data
Not a fit
  • Organizations under $500K
  • Pure advocacy or policy organizations
  • Anyone who wants a report to file rather than a plan to run
  • Situations where the ED is not the one deciding
  • Active compliance failure already in motion. That is a rescue engagement, not an audit. Call anyway.
The person doing the audit

Twenty five years of running the programs, not advising on them.

Fourteen years at North Texas Food Bank. Food 4 Kids from a pilot to 300 sites across 13 counties. Kids Cafe to 28 locations. Emergency food operations for more than 2,000 families per event during COVID. Every one of those programs carried federal money and every one of them passed.

25+
Years in nonprofit operations leadership
300+
Program sites built and scaled across Texas
100%
Audit compliance record on federal programs
500+
Partner nonprofits audited and supported
Straight answers

The questions every ED asks.

Do I have to sign up for a retainer after this?

No. The audit is a complete piece of work with a start and a finish. The plan is written for your team to run. If you want me to run it with you, $925 of the audit fee applies to your first month. If you do not, you still keep everything.

Can this be paid from grant funds?

Often yes. Capacity building and organizational effectiveness grants routinely cover assessment work, and many funders will fund an audit faster than they will fund staff. Bring your funder relationships to the call and we will look at what is available.

How much of my staff time does this take?

One hour from you at kickoff, thirty minutes each from up to five staff, and one hour from your team at the findings session. Under six hours of organizational time across two weeks. The document request is the heaviest lift and most of it is already sitting in a drive folder.

What if the findings are worse than we thought?

That is the most common outcome and it is a good day, not a bad one. A risk you can see has a due date on it. A risk you cannot see has a monitoring letter attached to it. You will get the honest version either way, delivered to you before it goes anywhere near a board packet.

Is this remote or onsite?

Remote as standard, which is what keeps it at this price. Houston area organizations can have the kickoff and the findings session in person at no additional cost. Onsite work outside the Houston area is quoted separately.

We already ran your free Operations Health Check. Is this the same thing?

No. The free tool is a self assessment that tells you roughly where to look. This is an outside operator going through your actual documents, talking to your actual staff, and telling you what is true. If the free check made you uncomfortable, this is the next step.

Operations Audit Scoping Call
Thirty minutes to scope this against your organization.

You have already read the page. This is not a pitch for it. We cover what is actually going on, what the audit would touch, whether the timing works, and whether it is a fit at all. If it is not, you will hear that on the call.

Two weeks from now you could know.

Thirty minutes and we will figure out whether the audit is the right move or whether you need something else entirely. Either way you leave the call with something useful.

Book the Scoping Call

30 minutes · No retainer attached · Houston and remote engagements welcome

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