Tech audit
You know how to spot the problems. Do you know how to sell them?
2-day training for tech freelancers: run a technical audit, present it to decision-makers, and turn it into a mission.
The symptom
Three days in their code. Twenty-two slides. Zero decisions.
You took the time to understand their product. You read the code, opened the pipelines, talked to the devs. You know exactly why their delivery is stalling, which areas nobody dares touch anymore, and what's going to break the moment they try to speed up.
On the day of the presentation, you go through your document. Twenty-two slides. The CEO listens politely. The CTO nods. At the end, someone says: "Thanks, that's very interesting, we'll discuss it internally."
You'll never hear from them again.
Your diagnosis was right. Your presentation wasn't. Between the two, there's a craft nobody taught you.
The cost of inaction
What it's actually costing you
As long as you can't turn a technical read into a client decision, four things keep happening on repeat.
You give your diagnosis away for free.
During pre-sales, you're asked for "your quick take." You deliver 80% of the value in a thirty-minute call, and the client walks away with enough to scope the mission without you.
You stay paid by the day.
You sell production days on a scope someone else decided. Your day rate plateaus because the only point of comparison is the price of the day.
You arrive once everything is already decided.
The structuring decisions were made before you got there, often poorly. You spend your engagements compensating for choices you had no part in.
You're replaceable.
A good freelance developer has plenty of competitors. A freelancer able to secure a 400k€ decision has very few.
What these four situations have in common: the skill is there, the offer isn't.
What changes
What you gain
An entry offer you sell at a fixed price.
A scoped audit, with a perimeter, deliverables and a price. No more haggling over the day rate.
A gateway to longer engagements.
The audit ends with a 90-day action plan. Whoever wrote the plan is the natural person to execute it, steer it, or support the team that will.
A repeatable method.
A diagnostic framework, a risk matrix, a presentation structure. You stop rebuilding your approach for every client and relying on whatever intuition you have that day.
Credibility with decision-makers.
You can explain technical debt to a CEO without jargon, flag a serious problem without triggering panic, and make trade-offs explicit instead of just enduring them.
A shift in what you're actually selling.
You're no longer billing execution capacity. You're billing judgment.
Profile
Who it's for
Experienced freelance developers, tech leads, technical consultants, freelance CTOs and fractional CTOs working with startups, SMEs, scale-ups or product-tech teams.
You need real experience in development or architecture. Ideally, you've already lived through at least one of these situations: taking over existing code, technical debt blocking the roadmap, a late project, missing tests, fragile architecture, tension between product and tech, or securing things before a rewrite or a scale-up.
This isn't for you if
you're looking for an exhaustive code review method, a security certification, or a theoretical architecture course. Here, we work the full chain: scoping, diagnosing, prioritizing, presenting, selling the next step.
The method
The main steps
Understand what the client is really buying
Behind a request for a technical review, there's almost always a leader who wants to regain control before a decision they can't afford to get wrong. We work through the real triggers behind an audit request and what they reveal about the hidden need behind it.
Scope a sellable audit
Perimeter, out-of-scope items, stakeholders, access, duration, deliverables. This is what separates an audit you can deliver in five days from an impossible promise that will cost you money and credibility.
Diagnose with a framework, not by feel
Seven dimensions of analysis, from product to governance, through architecture, maintainability, tests, delivery and data. You also learn to gather information fast: which documents to request, who to interview, and which weak signals to listen for. "Nobody dares touch this part anymore" often says more than three days of reading code.
Qualify and prioritize the risks
Twenty technical findings, five priorities to present. We work through the difference between an observation, a problem, a risk and a recommendation, and the criteria that let you arbitrate on something other than what annoys the engineer in you.
Present to decision-makers
An executive summary, an overall risk level, recommendations tied to business stakes. We also work on posture: showing the severity without being alarmist, and without humiliating the team in place.
Sell the next step
A 30/60/90-day action plan, then the mission proposal that naturally follows: fixes, CTO support, rewrite scoping, ongoing steering. We close on packaging your audit offer and the objections you'll run into.
It all wraps up with a full client case: you produce the scoping, the diagnosis, the summary, the action plan and the commercial proposal, then present it out loud as if to a real client.
Deliverables
What you leave with
Reusable materials for your very next engagement, not a slide deck to file away.
Pricing
Format and pricing
2 days
€1,800 excl. VAT
The full journey: diagnosis, prioritization, presentation, action plan, offer packaging.
3 days
€2,700 excl. VAT
An extra day entirely devoted to your offer: positioning yourself as an auditor, building your own templates, a pre-sales simulation with objection handling, and a final pitch of your offer to the group.
Deliberately practical teaching: short methodology inputs, case studies, role-play, interview simulations, deliverable production and group feedback.
A single audit sold at a fixed price pays back the training. That's roughly the size of a two-day flash audit, the easiest format to sell right after the course.
Frequently asked questions
Questions we get asked
"I saw problems in the code."
"Here are the three risks threatening your roadmap, the decision to make before the end of the month, and the plan for the next 90 days."
It's the same technical skill. They're two different jobs, and two different pay levels.