The method, unlocked
Why this is not withheld
Most agencies treat their audit process as the product and give you a summary. The process here is not the scarce part — attention is. A practice owner with an afternoon can absolutely run this, and a proportion who do will conclude their flow is fine and keep their money.
That outcome is genuinely cheaper for both sides than a discovery call arriving at the same answer six weeks later. Intake is capped at three builds a month, which means the constraint on this business is build capacity rather than lead volume — so there is no reason to make the diagnosis artificially hard to obtain.
What you need before starting
The method
The order matters more than the detail. Sizing before locating produces a number with nowhere to go, and locating before recording a baseline leaves you unable to tell whether anything you change works.
Stage 01 · 20 minutes
Before touching anything, write down last month's booked appointments, how many did not happen, and your average appointment value. Date it. Every judgement later in the audit is measured against these three numbers, and an audit run without a baseline produces opinions instead of findings.
What this stage produces
Three numbers and a date, in writing.
Stage 02 · 30 minutes
Open your site on a phone, in a private window, as somebody who has never been to your practice. Book an appointment. Then abandon one halfway, cancel one, and try to reschedule one. Record what happened at each point rather than what you expected to happen — the gap between the two is most of the value of doing this.
What this stage produces
A written trace of every step, including the number of taps to a held slot.
Stage 03 · 40 minutes
Work through the 24 checks across the eight handoffs. The single question behind all of them: if everyone forgot about this handoff for a fortnight, would it still happen? If not, nothing owns it — and unowned handoffs are where the money goes.
What this stage produces
A list of handoffs that currently depend on somebody remembering.
Stage 04 · 30 minutes
Convert the list into figures using your baseline. Missed appointments are the easiest: volume multiplied by rate multiplied by value. Recall is next: active clients, expected visits a year, and the proportion that never return. The handoff that annoys you most is frequently not the one costing most, and this is the step that reveals it.
What this stage produces
A monthly and annual figure against each gap, ranked.
Stage 05 · 30 minutes
For each ranked gap, note the cheapest thing that would close it and what it would cost. Some will be free process changes. Some need a tool. One or two may need something built. Deciding in that order stops you buying a system to solve a problem a reply-to address would have fixed.
What this stage produces
A ranked list of gaps, each with a cheapest-possible fix and a cost.
Stage three is the longest, and it has its own page: the 24 checks across 8 handoffs
Where this version stops
Published because an audit that hides its own blind spots is worse than no audit — you would act on it with unearned confidence.
You know where the booking button is, which appointment types exist and what the confirmation means. That knowledge is exactly what a new client lacks, and it is unavailable to you by definition. It is the single largest weakness of a self-run audit.
Nothing in a standard booking tool records the visitor who opened the page, considered it and left. Without that, the discovery and booking handoffs are assessed on inspection rather than on evidence.
A self-run audit tells you whether your flow works. It cannot tell you whether five taps is normal or slow, because you have no other practice's flow beside it.
The honest comparison
The self-run audit
The Recovered Revenue Report
If you run the self-serve version and want the findings checked, send them with the report request. A completed self-run audit makes the written report considerably sharper, because the arithmetic is already agreed before anyone looks at the flow.
Or hand it over
Same five stages, run for you, delivered as a written report and a recorded walkthrough inside three business days. No charge, no call booked on your behalf, and a plain answer if the arithmetic says do nothing.