The 5 Business Areas Every Owner Should Audit Before Scaling or Hiring


Hi Reader,

I used to believe that growth was just a matter of working harder. More clients, more revenue, more success.

But when I ran our agency, the harder we worked, the more chaotic everything became. We had the revenue. We had the client volume. We even had a team. But what we didn’t have was structure.

We were reacting instead of leading. My mom and I would look at each other and say: “Why does this feel harder now that we’re successful?”

We weren’t scaling - we were surviving. And the longer we operated that way, the more expensive it became.

The hidden cost of not knowing what’s broken

I hear business owners say things like: “I know we need help, but I don’t even know where to start.” I understand that feeling at a cellular level.

When I joined our agency, everything lived in my mom’s head - standards, expectations, decisions, processes, client history. She cared deeply, but the business had outgrown the way it was being run.

Nothing was obviously broken. Everything simply required too much effort.

The biggest risks in a business aren’t the loud failures. They’re the blind spots, the things that don’t feel broken until growth exposes them.

That’s why I created the Business Operations Audit: a structured deep dive into five core areas that determine whether your business is truly ready to scale.

It’s a structured way to look at the five areas that determine whether a business is actually ready to grow: people, processes, performance, finance, and strategy. Once we finally did this inside our agency, we stopped reacting to the business and started leading it.

We gained clarity, grew profits by over 200%, and eventually sold the business for 3x revenue.

Not because we hustled harder, but because we finally understood where the gaps were.

If this resonates with where you're at in your business, I wrote a full blog post that walks through the five areas of the audit and exactly what we uncovered inside our agency. You can check it out here.

If you're ready for an outside perspective to identify what's holding you back from scaling, book a complimentary Discovery Call to see if a Business Operations Audit could help you get out of the weeds and move your business forward.


As always, please feel free to reply directly to this email with any questions, suggestions, or topics that you'd like to see covered in subsequent issues.

See you next month!

Cheers,

Anais

P.S. If you enjoyed reading this, please send it to someone who might find it helpful as well. If you were forwarded this email, please consider subscribing to receive future issues and follow me on LinkedIn and Instagram for more business and leadership content.

“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” - James Clear

Anais Babajanian

Read more from Anais Babajanian
fractional coo

Hi Reader, Lately, I’ve been having a lot of conversations with business owners who feel stuck and like they just can't break through to the next level. Their first thought is usually, “I just need to hire a manager to take things off my plate.” But here’s the thing: hiring a manager doesn’t always solve the root issue. When I joined my family’s insurance agency, it had already been running for 10 years. On paper, things looked great — steady revenue, loyal clients, and a team that worked...

Crisis management cycle

Hi Reader, When I was in the trenches of running our family insurance agency, there was a moment when I sat in my car outside the office and couldn’t bring myself to go inside. Not because of any single crisis, but because I knew another day of putting out fires was waiting for me. Sound familiar? The Reactive Leadership Trap When I took over the agency, my focus was pure survival: streamline processes, build a team, get things running efficiently. I told myself I’d work on the bigger picture...

employees need AI training

Hi Reader, I've been having conversations with business owners and leaders across various industries lately, and they're all seeing the same troubling pattern: AI is making their quality and productivity problems worse, not better. Employees are taking AI's first response without providing proper context. They're accepting solutions without understanding the underlying logic. Teams are skipping the critical thinking steps that ensure quality deliverables—the very skills that separate good...