Week 1 of every engagement is the audit. Weeks 2 to 4 are the build, and it is running by day 30.
The audit is a spreadsheet with four tabs, and the coach fills it in before the first call. Nothing gets built from a guess. Most of the answers are short. The ones that are blank are the finding, and they are almost always in the same block.
What does the marketing block ask?
Four things: where clients come from, which source is strongest, what the main claim of the offer is, and what people expect when they buy. The last one matters most to the back end. If the marketing promises something the team cannot fulfil, no amount of delivery fixes it, and the refund requests start in week two.
The sales block asks four more. How the sales team is structured, what the sales process is, who owns onboarding, and whether the handover is smooth. Most refund requests trace back to an expectation set on the sales call, so the audit reads the close before it reads the coaching. A recorded sales call is what settles that later, with the client and with Stripe or Whop.
What does the fulfillment block ask?
Twenty-four questions, starting with an invitation into the training so we can see what clients see. Then the team: who is on it, and whether it can handle the volume. Then the numbers.
- Client success rate: the share of clients who reach the promised result.
- Time to value: how fast a client gets the first real win.
- Lifetime value, and lifetime duration: what a client pays, and how many months they stay.
- On-track rate: how many clients are on track versus off track, by the time set per stage.
- Share of revenue from existing clients, and which upsells and resells exist.
Around the numbers sit the mechanics. Which client management software runs it, and whether every client's progress is tracked A to Z. Who owns client success, and how referrals, testimonials and Trustpilot reviews are collected.
Then offboarding and how relationships are kept. Whether anyone checks in with past clients at a set month. Whether past clients are marketed to, and whether new clients get a welcome gift. Then active clients and monthly revenue.
Why can most coaches not answer the tracking lines?
Because nothing after the sale is tracked; revenue, ad spend and close rate are tracked to the dollar. Ask what data is collected in fulfillment and the answer is usually "we know when people started." Coaches know a rough direction, an "average something", and cannot give the number, and that is the red flag.
It is also the most useful result of the audit. A blank client success rate means the promised result was never defined, because there is nothing to count. A blank on-track rate means no milestone has a time, and a blank share of back-end revenue means there is nothing to sell next. The blanks are the build list for weeks 2 to 4, at Acquisition Ace as in every engagement.
Result from a named client with written permission. Typical clients of this cohort saw a range of outcomes; nothing here is a guarantee. How we handle claims.
When I ask for the tracking block, most coaches know a rough direction, an "average something", but not the number. Tracking goes in immediately, in the first 30 days. And when the sheet says the team is not good or the offer is bad, I say it on the call, straightforward without being disrespectful. Short term they feel offended. It usually turns out correct, and they appreciate it afterwards, always.
What is on the offers sheet?
One row per offer: flagship, low-ticket entry at $97 to $200 a month, premium upsell, resell or keep-your-membership offer, and downsell. Per row: the claim, what is included, the price, the running time and the monthly revenue it makes.
The sheet shows the resell gap in one glance. Most coaches make 95 to 99% of revenue on the front end, and the sheet has one row with revenue in it.
Video Business Academy's sheet had a $4K to $7K main offer with upsells, resells and downsells around it. Thirty percent or more of its revenue sat in the resell rows. The next three offers, and the deliverables they would need, come out of the empty rows read next to the survey answers from existing clients.
What do you tell the coach afterwards?
What the sheet says, even when it is that the team is not good or the offer is bad. People do not like hearing that on a Zoom call. Nobody's audit answers go anywhere else; the coach hears them, and the build list is written from them.
Three things come out of every audit. The client success rate, or the reason it cannot exist yet. The resell gap, meaning what could be sold to clients already in, and the next three offers with the deliverables behind them. Then the build.
Note. The free 45-minute audit is the short version of this, on a call. You leave with the same three things whether or not we work together: your client success rate, your resell gap and the next three offers. No pitch.
Further reading: The seven back-end KPIs of a coaching business · What is a client success rate, and how do you measure it?
