What the audit actually looks like, hour by hour.

People hear audit and picture a survey, a focus group, a deck. None of that. The audit is two weeks of structured listening, document review, and pattern matching, and the output is a written memo a CEO reads in 20 minutes.

Week one

Ten 45-minute conversations. The CEO. The COO or president. The two longest-tenured managers. The most recent senior hire. The manager who has struggled most publicly. The recruiter. The office or operations lead. Three random ICs at different levels. No prepared themes, no template — open questions about what they think the function is for and what isn't getting done.

Alongside the conversations: the actual documents. The handbook. The last six months of offer letters. The last performance review cycle's outputs. The hiring requisition queue. The org chart. Whatever passes for a comp band. Whatever's logged in the HRIS.

You can read a company's people function in its documents. The handbook tells you what the company is afraid of. The offer letters tell you how the company values itself.

Week two

Synthesis. Patterns get named. We map every conversation against the documents and write the things people said that the documents don't admit. We test our hypotheses with two or three follow-up calls.

The output isn't a deck. It's a 6 to 10-page memo with a one-page executive summary at the top. Current state. The work that isn't getting done. The cost of leaving it as-is. The 90-day rebuild plan with a named owner for each piece. A short list of policies to cut. A short list of policies to write.

What the CEO does with it

Reads it. Marks it up. Brings it to the next leadership meeting. Decides whether to greenlight the rebuild. The memo is the deliverable of the audit — fixed-fee, two weeks, no workshop, no offsite. If the rebuild doesn't go forward, the CEO still has the memo. Which is what they were buying.