Insights

The Auditor's Eye

A former tax auditor on the gap between knowing how your business works and being able to prove it, and why closing that gap is the core of good operations.

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For years, my job came down to one question. Can this be proven? I worked as a tax auditor, and the work was quieter than people imagine. Someone reports a number and tells a story about how they got to it. My task was to see whether the record behind them held the story up. Most of the people I sat with believed what they told me. They were not lying. They just could not always show it.

That kind of work changes how you see, and it never fully switches off. I now run a small bilingual firm in Winnipeg that teaches teams how good operations work and then helps owners install and run them. When I walk into an owner-run business, I catch myself doing the old thing without deciding to. I listen to how the owner describes the business. Then I look for whether the business can actually show what the owner just said.

Knowing is not proving

Every owner knows how their business works. They built it from nothing, and they can tell you why a customer stayed, why a shipment went out a day late, why margin slipped in March. That knowledge is real and hard-won. I never doubt it.

But knowing how something works and being able to prove how it works are two different things, and the gap between them is where value leaks. "We always ship within two days" is a belief. Whether you can pull the last hundred orders and show it is a fact. For a long time nobody notices the two have drifted apart, because the business still runs. It runs on the owner. The owner is the proof, walking around, holding it all together in their head. That feels like control. It is actually the fragile part.

What the eye keeps landing on

Three things show up again and again. None of them look like problems at first, which is exactly why the owner has stopped seeing them.

The first is the process that lives in one head. There is always a person who "just knows" how the returns get handled, or which supplier to call when the usual one is out, or how the month actually closes. Nothing is written down because it has never needed to be. That person has never been sick during a crunch, or has been, and everyone still talks about the week it happened. When I ask to see the process, there is nothing to see. There is only Marie. Marie is wonderful. Marie is also a single point of failure, and if you ever want to sell or step back, a buyer will pay for a process and will not pay for a promise that Marie stays forever.

The second is the number nobody can reconcile. Every business has one. The sales figure the owner quotes does not match what comes out of the accounting system, and both differ from what the spreadsheet says. Everyone has quietly agreed on which version to trust and moved on. When I ask why they differ, the room goes still. That silence is the finding. A number you cannot trace to its source is a number you cannot manage, and it is the first thing a careful buyer or lender pulls on.

The third is the step everyone does differently. Ask five people how they onboard a client or log a complaint, and you get five answers, all sincere, all a little different. This is where my Lean training and the audit habit meet. Variation you cannot see is variation you cannot improve. When every person runs the step their own way, you are not running one process. You are running five, and your quality is whichever one the customer happened to get that day.

Naming the gap is most of the work

Here is the part owners do not expect. Naming these gaps plainly, out loud, is already most of the job. The moment you write down how Marie actually closes the month, other people can do it. The moment you trace the sales number to one source, you can trust it and act on it. The moment you agree on one way to onboard a client, you can measure it and make it better.

This is what good operations really are. Not more software, not a thicker binder. It is closing the distance between what you know and what you can show, one process at a time, until the business can prove itself without you in the room. That is also, quietly, what makes a business calmer to run on an ordinary Tuesday.

Why this protects you whether you sell or not

People assume this verification work only matters when you are getting ready to sell. It matters far more than that. A business that can prove how it works is a business you can hand to a manager, take a real vacation from, finance, or sell when you choose. A business that cannot is one you can never fully put down, no matter how good it looks on paper.

This is the lens I bring to fractional operations work, and it is what makes it different from generic help. I am not there to be a second pair of hands. I am there to find the gaps between what a business believes about itself and what it can demonstrate, and to close them, in French or in English, until the operating system holds without the founder wired into every part of it. You get to keep knowing how your business works. You also get to prove it.

If any of this sounds like your business, I am happy to talk it through. You can see how the fractional operations work is structured at /services/fractional-operations.html, reach me through /contact.html, or book a short call at cal.com/provenance/30min.