Company stage: 
Team size: 
Problems: 

Audit operations:

1. Core processes
   Map out: How do we actually do these?
   - Hiring & onboarding
   - Financial management (payroll, invoicing, budgeting)
   - Customer support
   - Feature delivery (coding to shipping)
   - Fundraising/investor relations
   - Board management
   - Compliance & legal
   
   For each:
   - Is there a written process?
   - Is it followed consistently?
   - Who owns it?
   - How long does it take?
   - When does it break?

2. Process health scoring (1-5 scale)
   For each process:
   - Is it documented? (1 = not at all, 5 = detailed with examples)
   - Is it followed? (1 = rarely, 5 = always)
   - Is it efficient? (1 = wastes time, 5 = optimized)
   - Is it scalable? (1 = breaks at 10 people, 5 = scales to 100+)
   
   Total score:
   - <8: Broken, causing problems
   - 8-12: Works but inefficient
   - 12-16: Pretty good
   - 16-20: Solid

3. Common operational failures
   Check which plague your company:
   - Inconsistent hiring (each manager does it differently)
   - Money chaos (no budget, surprise invoices, miscalculations)
   - No customer process (chaos whenever someone calls)
   - Unclear decision-making (conflicts, reversals, confusion)
   - Documentation missing (knowledge in heads only)
   - Context switching (everyone interrupting everyone)
   - No prioritization (everything feels urgent)
   - Founder bottleneck (founder must approve everything)

4. Efficiency gains
   For your top 3 pain points:
   - How much time is wasted? (hours/week/team)
   - What's the cost? (salary hours + quality impact)
   - What's the fix? (process, tool, automation, hire)
   - Timeline to implement?
   - ROI calculation?

5. Quick wins (high impact, low effort)
   - What could you fix this week?
   - What decision matrix would clarify priorities?
   - What documentation would save repeated questions?
   - What automation would save 5+ hours/week?

6. Scaling indicators
   As you grow, which processes will break first?
   - 10 people: Still works (mostly)
   - 25 people: [Which process breaks?]
   - 50 people: [Which process breaks?]
   - 100 people: [Which process breaks?]
   
   Build these processes NOW before they break

7. Cultural vs systemic issues
   Some problems are "people don't follow process"
   Some are "process is bad"
   
   Which is your issue? (Fix differently)
   - If people don't follow: improve clarity & ownership
   - If process is bad: redesign it
   - If no process: create one

8. Measurement
   For each key process, what's the metric?
   - Hiring: Time-to-hire? Quality of hire?
   - Support: Response time? Resolution time? CSAT?
   - Feature delivery: Lead time? Defect rate?
   - Finance: Invoice-to-payment time? Forecast accuracy?
   
   What would improve mean?

Examples

Input

{
  "stage": "Series A (raised $3M last month)",
  "teamSize": "12 people (5 eng, 3 sales, 2 CS, 2 exec)",
  "painPoints": "Hiring chaos, no budget process, customer onboarding takes forever, too many meetings"
}

Output

Complete operational audit with process mapping, health scoring, failure identification, efficiency gains analysis, quick wins, scaling indicators, cultural vs systemic diagnosis, and measurement framework.

Sources

https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/operations/our-insights/transforming-operations-with-intelligent-automation

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