Proprietary methodology

The Leak Audit Method

How Negodiuk.ai finds $50K to $400K of leakage in B2B operations in 5 days. Built for operators between $5M and $50M revenue. Documented openly because if you're shopping audit providers, this is what you're comparing.

From Negodiuk.ai · Forbes-featured Fractional AI Officer + Forward Deployed Engineer practice · 18 publications including Forbes
Section 1 · Why a method matters

Without a method, every AI consultant talks vague ROI.

With a method, you can audit the audit.

Most AI consulting engagements start with a discovery call that turns into a 50-slide deck full of "AI is the future" pages, vendor logos sold by partnership, and a six-figure proposal you can't push back on because the math isn't shown.

We built The Leak Audit Method™ to make that impossible. The methodology is the deliverable. Every dollar number lands with the assumption stack visible. Every leak gets cross-checked against industry benchmarks before it ships. If the math is wrong, you can name where.

The method is public because we'd rather you understand it than trust us blind. If a competitor copies it word for word, that's a win for the operators they reach. We're not trying to gatekeep the method. We're trying to ship audits that hold up.

What you can compare us to

Read this page before you buy any AI audit. Ask the other provider to publish their method. If they won't, ask why. The answer will tell you whether you're buying a deliverable or a sales call.

Section 2 · The 5 days

Days 1 through 5 happen on consecutive business days.

We don't drag engagements. The whole thing is over inside one week.

Day 1

Discovery

90-minute kickoff · in person if you're in NYC, video if you're not

What we do

Owner question first 15 minutes ("what wakes you up at night?"). Tool inventory across CRM, ERP, accounting, comms, industry-specific stack. Walk one revenue process end to end. Set up read-only access.

What you provide

The owner or COO in the room. Optional: one operations lead who knows where the bodies are buried. 90 minutes of focused time.

What you get

A scoped data request list within 24 hours. If we can already tell the audit won't return its fee, we tell you today and we don't bill.

Day 2

Data Collection

Asynchronous · no call required

What we do

Read your site end to end. Walk your dashboards if shared. Draw an Excalidraw workflow diagram of your highest-revenue process. Pull SMB benchmarks for your industry and revenue band.

What you provide

The specific pulls we asked for: AR aging, top-50 customers, inventory turn, vendor pricing, CRM pipeline, lead-source reports. CSV or PDF, whatever your ERP exports.

What you get

By end of day: a workflow diagram of your core process, a benchmark sheet showing where you sit vs your industry peers, and a draft hypothesis list (usually 5 to 8 candidates).

Day 3

Analysis

Internal work day · no client touchpoint unless we need clarification

What we do

Narrow 5 to 8 candidates down to the three leaks that pass the quantifiable / fixable-in-12-weeks / owned filter. Build the dollar math with named assumptions. Cross-check against industry benchmark, operator sanity, and AI applicability.

What you provide

Nothing. Optional: answer one or two clarifying questions over email if we need them.

What you get

Three quantified leaks, each with a dollar number and a visible assumption stack. This is where the methodology earns its fee.

Day 4

Report Build

Internal build day · single deliverable

What we do

Assemble a 20-page PDF report. Fixed structure across every engagement. Pages adapt to your data. Executive summary, three leak deep-dives, three quick fixes, workflow diagram, benchmark sheet, 90-day roadmap, AI Sprint proposal.

What you provide

Nothing.

What you get

The 20-page PDF, ready for the next morning's walkthrough. Printable. Wall-poster format for the workflow diagram so your ops team can post it.

Day 5

Delivery and Sprint Pitch

60-minute walkthrough call · video, recorded if you want it

What we do

Page-by-page review. We pause for questions, you push back, we adjust assumptions in real time. We walk the three free quick fixes. We close with one question: which leak would you build first?

What you provide

60 minutes. The owner or COO again. Optional: anyone on your team who'd own a fix.

What you get

The report in perpetuity. The workflow diagram for your ops wall. Three quick fixes you can run in-house starting Monday. A 1-page AI Sprint proposal inside 24 hours if you name a leak you want built.

Section 3 · The 3-hypothesis rule

We deliver three leaks. Not five. Not ten. Three.

Ten leaks gives you a paralysis report. Three leaks gives you a quarter's worth of focused work. Operators ship the three. They never ship the ten.

The three get selected by this filter. Hypotheses that fail any of the three get cut, even if they're real leaks. The audit doesn't help if you can't act on it.

01
Quantifiable

We can put a dollar number on the annual leak with named assumptions. If the math is hand-wave, the leak doesn't ship. You should be able to argue with our 0.6% recovery rate. You shouldn't be able to argue that we made it up.

02
Fixable inside 12 weeks

Either with an AI system we'd build, or a process change you can run in-house. If the fix is a 9-month enterprise rebuild, we flag it for a different conversation. The Leak Audit Method ships leaks you can close this quarter.

03
Owned

There's one person on your team who'd own the fix if you said go on Monday. If nobody owns it, the audit shelves itself the day after we leave. We've seen it happen at other practices. We don't ship leaks without owners.

Cross-checks before publishing a leak

Industry benchmark. Does the leak size match what we'd expect for an operator of your scale? Outliers get flagged for re-pull, not silently published.

Operator sanity. Is the leak actually a leak, or just a different business model choice? Sometimes a distributor running 47-day DSO is doing it on purpose to win share. We ask.

AI applicability. Is this fixable with an AI system we'd actually build, or is it a process problem that needs a human change? If it's pure process, we still report it. We just don't pitch a sprint on it.

Section 4 · Sample finding

Operator A composite. $370K of quantified leakage.

Names, exact dollar figures, and identifying details are composites drawn from typical B2B distribution engagements. Numbers reflect realistic ranges for an operator at the described scale.

Anonymized engagement profile

Building materials distributor · $20M annual revenue

32 employees · 4 in AR and accounting · $650K AR book · NetSuite + HubSpot + QuickBooks + Outlook + Excel for everything else

Owner's stated pain on Day 1: "Cash is always tighter than it should be. I don't know if it's pricing, payment terms, or my AR team. I just know I'm sweating Fridays."

Leak 01

AR drift below the radar · $4,320/month

The AR team is doing a fine job on the loud invoices. Anything above $25K gets a phone call within a week of aging into the 30-day bucket. What doesn't get a call: the fifteen $4K to $7K invoices aging at the same time. Each one is individually too small to be the day's priority. Collectively they're holding $80K to $90K in unnecessary float, every month.

AR book: $650K outstanding
Average DSO: 47 days vs industry benchmark 32 days
Unnecessary float: $650K × (15 / 47) = $207K captive
Cost of capital: 8% line of credit → $16,560/year
Recoverable write-offs (industry 0.6%): $46,800/year
AR staff time saved (6 hrs/wk × $35/hr loaded): $10,920/year
Annualized total: $74,280, or roughly $4,320/month
Leak 02

Pipeline rot in the long tail · $30K recoverable

Three reps work the top 20 active deals every week. Anything below the top 20 sits in HubSpot with no activity. The CRM shows 47 open deals with no contact in 21+ days. Average deal size in that long tail: $6,500. Conversion when re-engaged within 30 days runs around 11%. At 60+ days dormant, it drops to 3%.

47 dormant deals × $6,500 avg = $305,500 in pipeline sitting cold
11% close rate on re-engagement = $33,605 recoverable
Net of rep reactivation time: $24,800/quarter
Annualized rolling: $30K to $80K depending on how aggressively the long tail gets worked
Leak 03

After-hours intake gap · $13K average lost order

Last 90 days of inbound calls from the VoIP log: 87 received between 6pm and 9am. 14 from caller-IDs matching CRM accounts. Voicemail completion rate: 36%. Of those, follow-up the next day happened on 8 out of 14. Average order value of the ones that closed: $13,200. The leak isn't "we miss every after-hours call." The leak is "we miss 4 to 6 closable orders per quarter that the buyer didn't bother to call back because they got us at 7pm and competitor at 7:04pm."

After-hours unconverted opportunities: ~5 per quarter
Avg order value when these convert: $13,200
Quarterly loss: ~$66,000
Annualized: ~$264,000 in top-of-funnel that goes to a competitor with a 24/7 phone
Combined annualized leakage

Three leaks. Roughly $370,000 in capital costs, recoverable pipeline, and missed top-of-funnel. The audit cost Operator A $2,500. If they ship one Sprint and recover one leak, payback is under 60 days. If they ship none of the Sprints and only run the three free quick fixes from page 12 of the report, payback is still under 90 days.

Section 5 · What the method is NOT

What you won't get in the 20-page report.

The report is 20 pages because 20 pages is what fits the work. Not 50. Not 5. Five things you won't see in it.

[X]

No "AI is the future" pages. If you bought the audit, you already know AI is happening. We don't waste a page on the obvious.

[X]

No vendor logos sold by partnership. We don't have referral deals with platform vendors. Every tool we recommend is one we'd pay for ourselves in our own businesses.

[X]

No 50-slide PowerPoint. The deliverable is a 20-page PDF, printable. If you want a deck for your board, we'll build one inside an AI Sprint. We won't pad the audit.

[X]

No stock photos of robots. Or factory workers staring at holograms. Or any of it. The report has your data and our math.

[X]

No retainer pitch. We don't sell retainers. The audit ends at Day 5. If you want a Sprint, that's a separate one-page proposal you can sign or not.

[X]

No 90-day discovery phase. Other firms run "discovery" for a quarter and then write a proposal. We compress it into 5 business days. If your operation is complex enough that 5 days isn't enough, you're above the $50M ceiling and you need a different practice.

Section 6 · When to skip this audit

The Leak Audit Method isn't for everyone.

We turn down work where the audit won't return its fee. Here's who shouldn't buy it.

Profile Why we'd say no Better fit
Pre-revenue startup There's nothing to audit. No customer book, no AR book, no pipeline rot to quantify. Come back after the first $1M.
Below $5M annual revenue The dollar leaks are real but they're $1K to $5K each. Audit ROI is tight at $2,500 against a $300K-revenue book. Run the free 60-second diagnostic instead.
Above $100M revenue You have in-house AI teams or you're already on a McKinsey engagement. Different sales cycle, different deliverable. Talk to a big-four advisory practice or a boutique enterprise consultancy.
VC-funded software company You need platform vendors, not a Forward Deployed Engineer practice. Your unit economics are different. OpenAI Solutions, Anthropic FDE team, or a series-stage SaaS consultancy.
Pure-service firm with 100% manual workflows Legal practice on paper files, for example. AI ROI lands 12+ months out. Outside our comfort zone for a $2,500 audit. A digital transformation consultancy that bills by the year.
Pre-revenue exception

If you've raised $2M+ pre-revenue and are about to ship, we'll do a pre-launch architecture audit at a different scope and price. Email [email protected] with your raise stage and the launch date.

FAQ

Five things buyers ask before signing.

Why $2,500 flat instead of hourly?

Hourly billing rewards us for being slow. Flat fee rewards us for being right. We've shipped the methodology enough times to know what 5 days costs us. $2,500 covers it with a margin we're comfortable with. If we're wrong about scope on a specific engagement, that's our problem, not yours.

What does "no fit, no fee" actually mean?

If after Day 1 we can tell the audit won't return its fee for your operation, we tell you on Day 1 and we don't bill. If we run the full audit and don't surface at least one quantified leak, you don't pay. The cost of one bad-fit audit is much less than the cost of doing it and having you tell people we wasted your time. The market for this work is small. Reputation compounds. We protect it.

Do you sign an NDA before discovery?

Yes. Mutual NDA before Day 1, signed inside 24 hours of you saying go. Read-only access only. Nothing leaves your tenant. Nothing trains any model. Default is deletion within 72 hours of Day 5 delivery, or return via secure transfer if you prefer. The working spreadsheet lives on our local machine for the duration of the engagement and gets wiped at close.

Do we have to buy a Sprint after the audit?

No. The audit is the deliverable. The Sprint is a separate decision. Plenty of operators take the report, run the three free quick fixes themselves, and follow up with us 12 months later for a delta audit. That's a normal outcome. We're not running a funnel that requires conversion to make the unit economics work.

How fast can we start?

For a single audit, Day 1 typically books inside 7 to 10 days of you saying go. We run two audits in parallel max, so calendar pressure depends on the queue. Once we start, Days 1 through 5 happen on consecutive business days. We don't drag engagements. The whole thing is over inside one week.

Ready when you are

Two ways to run The Leak Audit Method™ on your ops.

Free 60-second diagnostic to see the hypothesis pattern before committing. Or book the full 5-day audit. Both run the same method, just at different depth and price.

No fit, no fee · NDA inside 24 hours · Names withheld by default
5 days end to end 3 leaks per audit $2,500 flat fee Forbes-featured practice 15+ languages voice stack