A fixed-price look at where your project work loses hours, and what it would cost to stop that. Two weeks, one document, three to five fixes ranked with real numbers. Costa Mesa is a ninety minute drive from the studio.
The studio sits in San Diego and Costa Mesa is ninety minutes north, which is close enough that we do this in person and far enough that owners ask about it on the first call. Travel is inside the price. A good share of the businesses we look at sit north of the county line.
Costa Mesa runs on project work. Design studios and creative agencies around SoCo and the Eastside, retail brands with a product calendar, restaurants opening rooms and changing menus, fabrication and action sports suppliers who build to order. Every one of them has to price a job that has never existed before, so the estimate gets built by hand, in a spreadsheet, by the person who can least afford to lose the hour.
That is where the audit starts. We take three quotes you sent last quarter, follow how each one got built, and find the parts that were identical every time: the rate table, the standard scope language, the pass-through costs, the follow-up nobody sent. Then we price what it would take for the first draft of a quote to be waiting for you instead of a blank page.
A creative agency on the Eastside. Scope, hours and change requests live in email, and the project manager reconstructs what was agreed every time a client pushes back. The audit prices a single record of what was promised, and says plainly whether the shop is large enough to need one yet. We also check whether the tool they already pay for could hold it.
A product brand near South Coast Metro. Wholesale orders arrive as PDFs from a dozen retailers, each formatted its own way, and somebody keys them into the system. We count the hours that costs per month and set it against what an intake step would cost to build.
A restaurant group with three rooms. Catering and private event requests come in through the website, Instagram and the phone, and the answer depends on who checks first. The audit follows one real week of requests, counts the ones nobody answered, and puts a dollar figure next to them.
We work with established businesses, roughly five to fifty people, with real operations and staff. The owner has to be close enough to the work to answer questions about how a job travels from yes to invoiced.
A one or two person studio does not need us yet. Below a certain volume there is not enough repeated work to earn the fee back, and the honest recommendation is ChatGPT Plus, a scheduler and a template you keep using. We say that out loud rather than sell around it.
The audit is $1,500, fixed, and it ends with a live walkthrough in plain language. If the document concludes that the answer is a setting in software you already pay for, that is the answer and you owe nothing further. Builds, when they earn their keep, run $6,000 to $15,000.
This page was drafted from a structured outline and hand-reviewed before launch. The work itself is custom, owner-operated, never templated.
One paragraph about your business is enough. Or just email hola@xala.studio.