The Handoff Audit

Most businesses don’t lose margin because one stage is broken. They lose it in the handoff between stages — when information that lived in one person’s head never made it to the next person who needed it. Five yes-or-no questions. Answer honestly.

Check YES or NO for each handoff below.

	Handoff	Question
1	Estimate → Project	If the person who ran the walkthrough disappeared tomorrow, could someone else run the job from what’s written down?
2	Project → Invoice	Does every approved change get written down and billed the same day — not “whenever there’s time”?
3	Invoice → Payment	Does every invoice go out the same day the work is confirmed done, without someone having to remember?
4	Payment → Review	Does every client get asked for a review within 48 hours of paying — every time, not just when someone thinks of it?
5	Completion → Future Work	Do you have a system that reaches back out to past clients on a schedule — or do they just sit in a folder?

Score Yourself

5 Yes Your business runs on a system.

3–4 Yes Mostly covered — one or two real gaps worth closing first.

0–2 Yes The business is still running through one person’s memory — yours. That’s exactly where the next dollar of margin is sitting.

Next step: whichever question you answered “No” to with the biggest dollar impact on your business — start there. The full breakdown of what typically gets lost at each handoff, and what closes the gap, is in The 5 Handoffs Where Your Business Actually Loses Money at yours-tim.com/blog/golden-thread-methodology.