Patrick Nesbitt CFA · CPA · ex-PE
The 14-Day Creator Audit · Two spots a month

Earn more from your creator business.
Run it without you in the room.

A fourteen-day audit by a CFA Charterholder, CPA, and ex-PE chairman, applied to creator-led businesses.

Book a 15-minute call → No pitch. No slide deck. You leave with one observation about your business that you didn't have when we started.
CFA · CPA · ex-PE · 13 years in finance · Cape Town
Patrick Nesbitt, CFA Charterholder and ex-PE chairman
01. What the audit surfaces

Most creator businesses cross seven figures without ever seeing their numbers the way a buyer would.

The team grew, the offers multiplied, the cash mostly arrives, and somewhere along the way the picture got blurry. The audit takes fourteen days to make it sharp again.

  1. Which of your revenue lines actually pays you per hour spent, once team time and tools are netted out.
  2. The margin gap between sponsored content, products, services, ad revenue, and licensing, side by side and ranked.
  3. Where you're subsidising one revenue stream with the cash thrown off by another, usually without realising.
  4. What the business is worth to a buyer today, and the three things that would change that number inside twelve months.
  5. The owner-dependency risks a buyer would discount the multiple for, and how to take them off the table.
  6. The tax and entity leakage almost every creator business has by year three.
  7. The three highest-return moves for the next twelve months, ranked by effort and payback.
02. Why this, why me

Thirteen years in finance, before I looked at a creator P&L.

KPMG audit at the start. Equity research at Macquarie next. Then forty-plus deals on the buy-side at Aligned Capital. Then chairman of Jaltech, a R1.7 billion fund. CFA Charterholder, CPA. I now apply that lens to creator-led businesses because most of them get operator-grade financial attention exactly once, at the moment of sale, when fixing anything has become expensive.

The audit is the same diagnostic a PE firm would run on a portfolio company in week one of an investment, sized down to fit a creator business and the founder running it.

13yrs In finance
40+ PE deals
R1.7bn Fund chaired
03. How it runs

Fourteen days. Three stretches. One report at the end.

01 Days 1 to 3

Onboarding

You send statements, Stripe and Shopify exports, sponsor invoices, a list of products and offers, and thirty minutes of context. I build the data room. You don't hear from me much in this stretch.

02 Days 4 to 10

Reconstruction

Margin reconstruction by activity. Sponsor and product profitability. Owner-dependency mapping. Valuation lens. Tax and entity leakage scan. You don't need to be available. I send one mid-week note flagging anything I want to pressure-test.

03 Days 11 to 14

Walkthrough & plan

Two calls. The first is a walkthrough of the diagnostic and the buyer's-eye observations. The second is a working session on the three highest-return moves. You leave with a written report, the underlying model, and a twelve-month action plan.

04. What you walk away with

Five artefacts. All yours to keep.

  1. A 15 to 25 page written diagnostic.
  2. The underlying P&L reconstruction, with every assumption sourced.
  3. A "what a buyer would notice" report. Ten to fifteen numbered observations.
  4. A twelve-month action plan, ranked by payback.
  5. The model and assumptions, yours to keep and update as the business changes.
05. Who this isn't for

The audit isn't for everyone.

If you're under ten thousand dollars a month, the surface area isn't large enough yet to find something worth fourteen days of diagnostic work.

If you only run ad revenue from a single platform with no products, services, or sponsor income, there isn't enough to disentangle.

If you're looking for a content coach or a posting strategist, I'm neither. Those people exist and some of them are very good. Tell me on the call and I'll point you to two I'd recommend.

06. Cost and cap
2.
Spots a month

Pricing is set on the discovery call, once we've established the size and shape of the business. No commitment until you've seen the number and slept on it.

If on the call I don't think the audit will pay for itself inside twelve months, I'll say so on the call.

The next fifteen minutes

Five revenue questions. The rest of the time I listen.

Book a 15-minute call → 15 minutes. No pitch. No slide deck.
About the cold DM

Cold DMs are noisy and I know it. The reason I'm running them is that creator-led businesses don't get operator-grade financial attention until the moment of sale, by which point the things that would have moved the multiple are no longer movable.

Two spots a month is the most I can run alongside my existing private-equity work. If the timing isn't right for you now, the offer holds.

Patrick