Growth Operations Compliance Audit

Every business that spends money on marketing eventually asks the same question, usually in a quiet moment after a bad month: where is it all going? Not the ad spend — that number is easy to find. The leads. The enquiries that came in, got acknowledged, and then dissolved somewhere between the form submission and the sales conversation.

The Growth Operations Compliance Audit is built to answer that question with evidence rather than opinion. It is a structured review of the entire growth system: how campaigns are planned, how leads are captured, who they are assigned to, how quickly they are answered, what the CRM actually contains, who owns the ad accounts, which agency is accountable for what, and whether any of it is written down anywhere other than in one person’s head.

It is deliberately a pre-scaling engagement. Doubling spend on a system that loses a third of its enquiries does not double revenue — it doubles the loss and hides it behind a bigger top line.

What we examine

We work across ten areas, and each one is checked against what actually happens rather than what the process document says happens. The two are almost never the same, and the distance between them is usually where the money is.

• Marketing workflow and campaign process — how a campaign goes from idea to live, and who signs off at each step.
• Lead capture and assignment — every route a lead can arrive by, and where each one lands.
• CRM usage and follow-up discipline — whether the system reflects reality, and how quickly records go stale.
• Sales follow-up and customer communication — first-response times, follow-up cadence, and what happens to a lead that says “not now”.
• Website, landing page and form journey — every form on every page, tested end to end, on a phone.
• Ad setup, tracking and reporting — whether conversions are firing, deduplicated, and attributed to something real.
• Agency and vendor performance — what was promised, what is being delivered, and how it is being measured.
• Digital asset ownership and access — who legally holds the ad accounts, domains, analytics and pixels.
• SOP gaps and team accountability — which recurring tasks have a named owner and which are assumed.
• Digital compliance readiness — consent language, data handling, claim substantiation and disclosure practice.

The ownership question most businesses fail

One check in this audit catches more people out than any other: who actually owns your marketing assets? Ad accounts created inside an agency’s business manager, a Google Analytics property on a freelancer’s personal login, a domain registered to a developer who has since moved on, a pixel nobody can find the admin for.

None of this matters until the relationship ends, and then it matters enormously — years of conversion history, audience data and campaign learning locked behind an account you cannot access. We produce a written asset register showing what exists, who holds admin, and what needs transferring. It is a boring deliverable that has saved clients from expensive rebuilds.

How the engagement runs

1. Week 1 — Access and evidence. We connect read-only to your ad platforms, analytics, website and CRM, and pull the last 90 days of lead records. Nothing is changed; nothing is switched off.
2. Week 1–2 — The people layer. Short interviews with everyone who touches a lead — sales, reception, whoever answers the WhatsApp number, the agency account manager. This is where the real process surfaces.
3. Week 2 — Reconstruction. We rebuild the lead journey from timestamps: arrived here, sat this long, answered by this person, then this. Gaps become visible because the timeline has holes in it.
4. Week 3 — Scoring and roadmap. Each finding is rated by impact and effort, and sequenced into a 30-day corrective plan you could hand to your team on the Monday after.
5. Week 3 — The findings session. A 90-minute walkthrough of everything, with the uncomfortable parts said out loud rather than buried on page 40.

What you receive

A growth system map, a lead leakage report, a marketing process audit report, a CRM and follow-up gap review, an agency and vendor review, a compliance-readiness checklist, a risk scorecard, and a 30-day corrective roadmap. All of it written to be read by a business owner, not by a marketing specialist.

Who this is for

SMEs, clinics, education brands, real estate businesses, agencies and service businesses that are already spending on marketing and want proof of what is working before committing more. It suits owners who would rather hear a hard finding now than a polite one later.

Who it is not for

Businesses that have not started marketing yet — there is no system to audit, and you would be paying us to describe a blank page. Also not for anyone who wants a document that validates a decision already taken. We write down what we find. We would rather tell you now than invoice you first.