About

Louis “Lou” Tillman

Strategist and creative director in Los Angeles. Founder of IV Consulting LLC. I advise founders, executives, and nonprofit leaders on positioning, brand, and revenue strategy, and I write due-diligence material for startups raising from accredited investors.

Canvas Audit exists because of a pattern I kept seeing from two directions at once. Writing diligence documents, I watched capital hesitate over companies whose public materials did not match their operating reality. Building brand and sales strategy, I watched strong operators lose engagements to weaker competitors who simply presented better. The same asset was responsible in both cases, and almost nobody was measuring it.

A website is the only document your buyer, your funder, your board candidate, and your next hire all read, usually without you present and usually before they decide whether to take the meeting. Most of them are built once, by someone good at something else, and then left alone for five years while the business outgrows them.

The audit is the instrument I built to measure that gap. It borrows its structure from diligence work: score against fixed criteria, record the evidence before writing the recommendation, and rank corrections by commercial return rather than by effort.

Where the work has been

Nonprofit advocacy and youth services, including work with organizations serving foster youth and out-of-school-time programs. Consumer brands in beverage and lifestyle. Professional services and financial advisory. Early-stage companies preparing positioning and diligence material for accredited investors.

How I work

Every audit is performed personally. Nothing is subcontracted, white-labelled, or generated by a scanning tool and reformatted. If your site is already strong I will say so and recommend nothing further. Turning down work I could have sold is the reason the referrals keep coming.