The Memorial Day Audit

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Most business owners treat Memorial Day week like a soft holiday. Phones slow down. Inboxes thin out. Clients go quiet. And what do most people do with that breathing room? They take a nap, fire up the grill, and pretend the next quarter will figure itself out.

That's a missed opportunity, and it's an expensive one.

This is the single best week of the year to run what I call a Cashflow Audit. Not the kind your accountant does in January when everyone is hungover and panicked. The honest kind. The one where you sit down with a coffee, pull up your numbers, and ask one question with zero ego attached: where is the money actually leaking?

I do this every year on the Tuesday after Memorial Day. Takes me about three hours. The first year I did it, I found nineteen thousand dollars in annual leaks I had completely missed. Not earned. Not optimized. Just plugged. Pure margin recovered.

Today I'm going to walk you through exactly how to run one yourself, and we're going to do it as a system, not a vibe-check. Print this. Or better, drop it into a doc and check off each step.

Money leaves your business through three doors. Most people only ever look at one.

Most owners check door one twice a year and never look at the other two. That's because doors two and three are uncomfortable. They require admitting that you've been making decisions on autopilot. Which, by the way, all of us do. I do. So let's just start there with no guilt and get to work.

Open your business credit card statements for the last twelve months. Not three. Twelve. You're looking for every recurring charge under five hundred dollars, because that's the band where things hide. Big charges you notice. Small charges you forget.

Make a single spreadsheet with three columns: tool, monthly cost, last time I actually used it. Be honest in column three. If the answer is 'I have no idea,' that's a cancel.

Now look for the duplicates. This is where it gets embarrassing. Last year I found I was paying for three different scheduling tools because I'd onboarded a contractor who set up a new one without realizing the existing one was already paid for. Forty-eight dollars a month. Five hundred seventy-six a year. Gone.

Quick rule of thumb: if you have two tools that do the same thing, you don't have redundancy, you have waste. Pick one, migrate, cancel the other. Today. Not when you have time.

This one's bigger. Open a fresh page and list every task you or your team did this past month that involved copying data from one place to another. Pulling leads from a form into a CRM. Sending an invoice. Following up on an unpaid invoice. Updating a dashboard. Creating a social post from a piece of long-form content.

For each one, ask: is this still a human task? Because in 2026, an enormous percentage of these jobs are no longer human tasks. They're handoffs that an automation platform can run for the price of a steak dinner per month.

This is where I lean on Make.com most heavily. I've built thirty-seven active scenarios in my account, and conservatively, they save me about twenty hours a week. At my hourly rate that's not a small number. The platform itself costs me less than dinner for two at a decent restaurant.

The trick with automation is to start small and additive. Don't try to automate everything in week one. Pick the most painful repetitive task you do this week. Build one scenario. Watch it run. Then pick the next one. By the end of the summer you'll have a small army of digital workers handling the busywork that used to eat your Tuesdays.

Pull up your top three offers, products, or services. For each one, write down what it costs you to deliver today, and what you're charging. Include the soft costs: software, contractor time, support, transaction fees.

Now ask: when did I last raise the price on this? If the answer is more than fourteen months ago, you have margin drift. Inflation alone has eaten somewhere between four and seven percent of your margin since you last priced it. That's before you account for the fact that your delivery has probably gotten better, which means you've been underpricing it twice over.

Raise the price on at least one offer this week. Not next quarter. This week. The world will not end. Your good clients won't leave. The clients who do leave were probably the ones costing you the most stress per dollar anyway.

One specific tactic that works for service businesses. Don't raise the price on existing clients. Raise it on the next new prospect who walks through the door. Tell the existing clients in writing that they've been grandfathered at the old rate, which makes them feel valued, and start collecting the higher rate immediately on every new deal. Within six months your effective average price has moved up meaningfully without you having had a single uncomfortable conversation with anyone who matters.

Here's a fun one most owners never do. Go look at your last twenty paying customers. For each one, write down where they actually came from. Not where you think they came from. Where the data says they came from.

If you have a CRM-grade system, this takes ten minutes. If you don't, this is exactly the gap that Go High Level is built to fix. I have clients running their entire customer journey through GHL and they know, to the lead, what each marketing channel is producing.

Once you have the list, ask the brutal question: am I spending money trying to grow channels that don't actually convert? Most people are. They have a favorite channel, usually the one they're personally comfortable with, and they keep feeding it. Meanwhile the channel that's actually producing customers gets ignored because it's less fun to work on. Fix the allocation. This single move tends to be the highest dollar move in the whole audit.

This sounds soft. It is not.

Once you've done steps one through four, you have a list of changes. Subscriptions to cancel. Automations to build. Prices to raise. Channels to reallocate. Write down every single one of them and assign each a deadline within the next sixty days.

Then write a one-paragraph letter to yourself dated July 4, 2026. In it, describe the business as it will be after these changes are done. Money saved. Hours recovered. Margin restored. Channels clarified.

Pin it somewhere you'll see it daily. The reason this works is that the audit itself doesn't change anything. The follow-through does. And the follow-through is what falls apart unless you make the future tangible.

If you want an extra layer of accountability, send the letter to one person who knows your business well. A peer, a mentor, your accountant, your spouse. Tell them you're going to do these things, and ask them to check in with you on July fifth. The simple knowledge that someone else has the list is the difference between a follow-through rate of thirty percent and a follow-through rate of ninety. Public commitment is free leverage.

Memorial Day week has the lowest external noise of any week in the second quarter. Clients are mostly quiet. Vendors are slow. Email volume drops by thirty to forty percent across most B2B businesses. That noise reduction is exactly what makes deep work possible. You'll never have a better signal-to-distraction ratio than you do right now.

Also, the timing matters. Whatever you fix this week will compound for the remaining seven months of the year. Wait until January and you've left a half-year of margin recovery on the floor.

So here's my ask. Block three hours. Not three days. Three hours. Run the audit. Then act on at least three of the items before the end of next week. That's it. That's the whole play.

This is how every methodical wealth-builder I know runs their business. Quietly, on schedule, with a checklist, while everyone else is grilling and not opening their dashboards.

Wealth-builders don't get richer by finding bigger ideas. They get richer by being more honest with their existing numbers. The audit isn't glamorous. It's not the kind of work anyone writes a book about. But over a decade, the people who run it twice a year quietly compound past the people who keep chasing the next shiny tactic.

Three hours. A spreadsheet. A coffee. A clear head. That's the entire requirement. And if you genuinely commit to acting on what you find, this Memorial Day week will be the most profitable week of your year.

If you're still on the fence about whether to actually block the time, let me put one more number in front of you. The average small business in the United States is leaving between three and seven percent of revenue on the table through some combination of the four issues we just walked through. On a five hundred thousand dollar revenue business, that's fifteen to thirty-five thousand dollars annually. On a two million dollar business, sixty to a hundred and forty thousand. These are not theoretical numbers. They're what the audit consistently surfaces.

Now compare that to almost any other use of three hours of your time this week. Could you sell another client in three hours? Maybe. Could you produce a new product in three hours? No. Could you find sixty thousand dollars hidden in plain sight in three hours? Yes. Every single time.

That's why this work is the highest-leverage thing on your calendar this week, even though it'll feel like the least exciting thing on your calendar this week. Boring is the move. Schedule it.

Have a real one. Enjoy the burgers. And then on Tuesday, do the work.

Build smart,

Alex Rivera

Wealth Architect at Wealth Grid

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