Related question
What should I expect from a first conversation with an AI advisor?
Short answer
Mostly questions about your business, not a presentation about theirs. A good first call spends its time on what prompted the question, what has already been tried, and where you suspect time or money is going. If you are watching slides in the first fifteen minutes, you are in a sales meeting.
The first conversation tells you more about a firm than any case study will, and it costs you half an hour.
Pay attention to the ratio. A useful call is mostly them asking and you talking. If the proportion inverts early, you are being sold a predetermined answer and the discovery is decoration.
Pay attention to what they ask about. Questions about your goals, how the operation actually runs, what your team can absorb, and what governance exists are diagnostic questions. Questions about your budget, your timeline, and who signs are qualification questions. Both eventually get asked. The order tells you what the firm is optimizing for.
Pay attention to whether they will tell you no. The most useful outcome of a first conversation is sometimes that you do not need help right now, or that the thing you need is not the thing they sell. An advisor willing to say that in the first thirty minutes is demonstrating the exact behavior you would want from them six months into an engagement.
Nothing needs to be prepared for a call like this. Useful things to bring, if you have them: what prompted you to look into this now, what has already been tried and what happened, where you suspect the losses are, and what your board or leadership is asking for.
If you want to have that conversation with us, it is at cal.com/team/blanecanada/discoverycall, or 630-492-0582.