What kinds of business were in the 55 audits?
Manufacturers, breweries, charities, jewellers, recruitment firms, escape rooms, a woodturner who trains veterans and a company that analyses explanted medical devices, among others.
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What 55 audits taught me
That most small business digital problems are basic and cheap to fix. Across 55 audits and 728 pages of reports, 76% of businesses had SEO issues, 69% ran client records from a spreadsheet, 64% had mobile usability problems and 67% needed call-to-action fixes. The gap between businesses that do digital well and those that do not was rarely money. It was having someone point out what was broken and show them how to fix it.
Why do small businesses fall behind on digital?
Because they are busy. Running the business, serving customers, making the products and answering the phone come first, and digital drops to the bottom of the list because something is always more urgent: a callback, a delivery to chase, a quote to send. The owner who has not updated the website in three years spent those three years doing the work that keeps the business alive. Not caring and not having time are different things.
Does doing digital well take a big budget?
Rarely. Most of the fixes I recommended were free or cheap. Meta descriptions cost nothing, testing the website on a phone costs nothing, setting up Google Analytics costs nothing, and HubSpot's CRM is free. What separated the businesses that did digital well was someone saying "you should look at this" and then showing them what to do about it. That was what the audits did: here is what is broken, here is what is missing, here is how to fix it.
Which problems came up most often?
The foundations. I could have spent every audit talking about AI and automation, but most businesses needed a working contact form, some meta descriptions and a homepage that talked about the customer rather than the company. 76% had SEO issues, 69% were running their client relationships from a spreadsheet, 64% had mobile usability problems and 67% needed call-to-action fixes. Without those basics nothing more advanced works.
What were the businesses not telling people?
Their own stories. A woodturner training veterans. A charity redistributing food. An instrument maker with a cult following in Japan. A networking group that presented at the United Nations. A manufacturer that had grown from eight million to thirty million and still wanted to be better. None of them were telling those stories online, and the content most of them needed was simple: talk about what you do and why it matters, write one case study, shoot one phone video. For the charities, the lesson became the 12-question checklist for trustees: the things to settle before spending, not after.
What did the audits teach me?
To listen first. The escape room owner who rebuilt her business model during lockdown, the photographer whose work hangs in galleries worldwide but whose website was invisible to Google, the energy charity helping people who could not afford to heat their homes, the recruitment firm finding jobs for veterans: extraordinary businesses with limited resources and no digital support. The most useful thing a consultant can do is understand what the business needs, then make the advice specific enough that someone can act on it tomorrow.
Related evidence: 55 digital audits. Here’s what I found.. Next in this journey: The first question I always ask.
Questions people ask
What is the first thing a small business should check?
Its website, on a phone. It costs nothing, and 64% of the businesses audited had mobile usability problems.
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