Do you audit your business?

What is a business audit?

If you’re in the United States and hear the word “audit” you probably have visions of IRS agents combing through your tax returns or carting you off to jail. But an audit for your business doesn’t have to be scary.

An audit is merely an inspection of or examination of something (most often financial.) From our tech to our time, to our content, and even our goals… anything is worth an audit. If it is to change, it must be observed!

Inside The Coworking Coven, we do various audits every quarter. One, as a way to keep ourselves informed and appraised of aspects of our business, and two, to develop the habit. And the habit is built around our unique audit framework.

How does The Fiery Well audit system work?

The Fiery Well A.U.D.I.T. framework is deceptively simple in design. It is a five-step framework for creating your system of evaluation and observation in your business, or area of life:

Audit Step One – Assess

Assess where you are, and what you have. Even if it’s nothing – that’s still something. To be able to assess something means you know what you’re looking at, and what you’re looking for. There is a need to identify something, a system, or a pattern. Go through the thing you want to audit and gather every bit of information you currently have on it.

Step Two – Understand

Understanding something requires paying attention to things we may not necessarily want to pay attention to. Often this can include things that don’t seem relevant to the thing we are auditing. Nevertheless, as you begin to understand more you will have more questions. Which creates more things to asses and build awareness upon.

Step Three – Decide

When you have an understanding that feels solid enough to continue building on then it is time to make a few decisions. We audit to initiate change and must decide what needs to change. Based on all the things you currently understand and want to understand, you need to make some decisions, most importantly of which is “what is the priority?”

Step Four – Implement

Based on the decisions you have made, and the priorities you have in mind, you need to start implementing the changes you want to see. This is often where learning to do less to accomplish more comes in handy.

Step Five – Track

You’ve made your decisions, you’re implementing changes, and now you need to track the changes. This is where you are going to expand on that list and develop an informative system for tracking.

Audit Bonus Step – Simplify

Simplifying is quite difficult because it most often requires removing steps, or things, from what we are doing. It requires further awareness, understanding, decision-making, and tracking. Again, this is a cyclical process that you will weave in and out of as you move along. And as you move along, you have the opportunity to simplify at every stage and every pass.

This is not a one-and-done system. Passing it off to your virtual assistant is not something we recommend, either. These are steps that we encourage the business owner to go through, iterate upon, and develop a system that works inside their business. (Care to hear a member’s perspective on the framework? Listen to the discussion between Amelia and myself on her podcast, Off the Grid)

The first audit is often the most difficult. Why? Because you’re navigating the framework while completing the audit, which is like juggling two tasks at the same time. And your second pass of the same audit, which is highly encouraged, will go much quicker.

The more you do the same audit, the faster it goes. And the more simplified you can make the system for yourself and your business, the better for everyone.

What type of audits should you do in business?

What should you audit? Anything you want to understand better and make data-informed decisions about your time, your tech, your content, your finances, your marketing, and on and on!

This is the beauty of the framework alone: it’s specific enough to guide you and flexible in requirements for what you need to evaluate.