Build Your Map.
Say "audit" to a business owner and something in them braces. ~ Receipts. Spreadsheets. A stranger with a clipboard finding what's wrong with your numbers. ~
That's not how I approach an audit.
A Wi,Mi audit has nothing to do with your accounts; it's an honest look at how work actually moves through your business, to start building the picture of how it would ideally move. Most businesses are running two versions of themselves at once - the one written down (if it’s written down), and the one that happens on a Wednesday at 4pm when something urgent blasts 🤯 through your peaceful week and folks scramble to sort it.
An audit is the first move in my approach to working, it's part of the Plan phase - before anything changes.
What I look at first
I don't start with the org chart, or policy documents. Those describe the business as we wish it worked.
I start with conversations; get various perspectives, understand why people are there and what they expect in return, outside of their pay check. My conversations direct me to the thread I want to pull on and start to draw the map of the who, what and why and most importantly, where the misalignment starts and grows.
In a few chats, following that thread tells me more in a few chats than a year of process documentation.
It shows me where the work actually lives, not where someone decided, months before, it should live, when the business looked different or didn’t even realise.
What owners are surprised by
Three things typically come up ...
1️⃣ discovering that someone in the business is doing the work of a role that doesn't officially exist. Not because anyone hid it, but because somebody quietly stepped into a gap because the alternative was things falling apart.
2️⃣ the bottleneck is not always that specific person but two steps away, sometimes that person simply can’t find a chair when the music stops - a handoff nobody owns, a decision that takes four people to make because nobody was given the authority to make it alone.
3️⃣ the hardest to hear: the process works but only because someone is band-aiding it,🩹 every single time. It has become part of the system, and no one remembers it's an actual bandaid.
Why the map 🗺️, not the org chart 🗂️
An org chart tells you who has authority. It doesn't tell you where work actually snags, and they rarely align. Systems problems tend to flourish in the handoffs where the gap between one task/workflow and the next. The person who "dropped the ball" may have been made steward of something with no clear brief or a process nobody was accountable for, at a point where the business had decided (but didn’t decide) that this was fine. Fix the handoff, and the person who we thought was the bottleneck may actually be perfectly competent and capable.
This is the epitome of "people problems are systems problems" in practice. It's not a soft way of avoiding accountability. It's a more accurate way of finding it.
The goal is to make the REAL business visible.
Too often, the issue isn’t visible and you don’t realise you have a leak because you haven’t taken the time to identify and understand. Find the leak and repair it before the mould sets in.
Now, don’t get me wrong a mould problem can be sorted. You may need some more experienced hands - but in the mean time, do yourself a favour and spend some time, exploring. 🧭
Something for you to try this week
Pick one repeatable workflow - onboarding a new team member/client, handling a complaint, starting or completing a project - and trace it. Every task in order, each handoff, every delay, every moment someone had to guess what happens next instead of knowing.
Write it down as it actually happens, not as the manual/policy says it should.
🎉 And voilà, you have your map. 🗺️
Why your map matters
A map of how your business actually works is a commercial asset; it's the difference between spending money on the symptom and spending money on the actual problem.
Knowing where the real work happens protects the thing you are always lacking: the capacity to think clearly instead of just reacting to whatever's loudest today.
And that's just good business, sustainable and properly maintained. ✅
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It might be unsettling seeing it in black and white, but it's still useful information in itself. What you do with that map is the harder part, and it's usually where an outside pair of eyes is a strong ROI.
But, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try your hand at addressing the gap or bottleneck.
Give me a shout if you’re stuck, or want that objective pair of eyes 👀
take care of you,
ZB.
Wi,Mi is based in Trinidad and Tobago and works with SMEs across the Caribbean and internationally. If your business is ready for that work, wherever you are, the conversation starts via 📋contact form, 📧 email hello@whatismustis.comor 📆 book a chat one time.
