A fixed-price look at where a slow process is costing you clients, and what fixing it would take. Two weeks, one document, every recommendation ranked with a number on it. Newport Beach is ninety minutes from the studio.
Newport businesses sell things where one client is worth more than a whole month of small transactions. A wealth practice, a law firm, a brokerage working the coast, a yard that services boats in the harbor: the deal sizes are large and the number of chances is small. An inquiry that sits in an inbox until Tuesday costs money, and most owners here can name the one that got away.
Most of that delay comes from work nobody wanted to be doing. A referral arrives by email and someone has to look up who owns the relationship. A prospect asks about fees and the answer gets assembled out of three old proposals. The advisor or the broker turns into the bottleneck, because they are the only person who can write the reply.
The audit follows one real inquiry from the first message to the signed engagement, marks every place where a person waited on another person, and puts hours and dollars against each one. Response time tends to be the cheapest thing to fix and the last thing anyone looks at. We also mark the parts that should stay human. In this market the relationship is the product, and a machine writing to a client would cost you more than it saves.
A wealth practice near Fashion Island. Bringing on a new client means the same twelve documents, collected by email, chased by phone and filed by hand. The audit counts the hours per client, prices an intake that collects and checks them once, and flags what compliance requires a person to review.
A brokerage working Corona del Mar and Newport Coast. Listing inquiries arrive from four portals and land in different inboxes, so the first reply depends on who happens to be at their desk. We measure how long the average lead waits, then price a single queue with a first response attached to it.
A marine services yard in the harbor. Every job gets quoted from scratch because no two boats are alike, and last year's nearly identical job sits in a folder nobody can search. The audit looks at whether past work can produce a starting estimate, what building that would cost, and how much of the quote still needs the yard manager's eye.
We work with owner-led companies of roughly five to fifty people with real operations, where the owner still knows how the work moves and can put us in a room with the people doing it.
One and two person practices get a no. There is rarely enough repeated work to earn the fee back, and the honest answer for a solo advisor is ChatGPT Plus, a scheduler and a proposal template you finish once. We would rather say that before you pay us.
The studio is in San Diego, which is the first objection we hear from Newport. It is a ninety minute drive, we make it, and travel sits inside the price. The audit is $1,500, fixed, and nothing obligates you to build what it recommends. Larger builds run $6,000 to $15,000 if you decide one is worth doing.
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.