What Happens in a Free Consultation (and What Does Not)

What a good call is for

The purpose is to establish whether there is a project worth doing, roughly what it would cost, and whether the two parties can work together. Thirty minutes is enough for all three if it is spent well.

What it is not for: a detailed specification, a fixed price, or a demonstration of every case study the supplier has.

What we ask, and why

1. What happens today, step by step? The current process is the specification for the new one.
2. How often, and by whom? Volume determines whether the project is viable at all.
3. What goes wrong, and what does it cost? Errors are usually where the business case lives.
4. What systems are involved? Integration difficulty drives price more than logic complexity.
5. What have you already tried? Saves repeating a failure and reveals constraints.
6. Who inside the business would own this? Projects without an owner do not succeed.

What you should ask

• Have you built something similar, and what went wrong with it?
• What would you not automate here?
• What is the smallest useful version of this?
• What is the range, and what moves it to each end?
• Who would actually do the work?
• What do you need from us, and how much of our time?

The second question is the most revealing. A supplier who cannot name anything they would leave alone is selling scope rather than advising on it.

What to prepare

Very little, and none of it formal. A rough description of the process, an honest sense of volume, the names of the systems involved, and a budget range you would be comfortable with.

Screenshots of the current spreadsheet or system are worth more than a written brief. Fifteen minutes of preparation makes the call twice as useful.

What you should leave with

1. A view on whether the project is worth doing at all
2. A rough cost range with the factors that move it
3. A rough timeline
4. A sense of the risks and what is hardest
5. A clear next step, whether that is a proposal, a discovery phase, or nothing

If you leave with none of those, the call was a qualification exercise for the supplier rather than a service to you.

On being told not to proceed

Sometimes the right answer is that the volume does not justify it, the process is not stable, or an off-the-shelf product would do the job for a fraction of the cost.

A supplier willing to say that in a first call is demonstrating something useful about how they will behave later, when the stakes are higher and saying no is harder.

Frequently asked questions