If an agency sends you a scope of work in the first call, you are not their client. You are their pipeline. A scope written from a discovery deck is a scope written from your guesses about your own business. We take thirty days before we put anything in writing, because the version of an engagement that survives contact with reality is the one that started from real data.
What we look at
The thirty days are not idle. We are looking at the things that change the shape of a scope:
- Financials. We need the last twelve months of P&L, cohort retention by acquisition month, contribution margin by SKU or product line, and CAC by channel.
- Stack audit. Every tool the business runs on, what it costs, who has admin access, and where the seams are. The seams are usually where the bottleneck is.
- Funnel walkthrough. We become a customer. We buy something, we email support, we abandon a cart, we ask a refund question. The friction tells the truth.
- Team interviews. We talk to at least three people outside the founder's seat. The people who actually do the work know where the real problems are.
- Cohort retention by channel. A blended CAC of $40 is meaningless if the $25 cohorts churn out at 90 days and the $80 cohorts compound for two years.
The questions we ask the founder
We ask the same set of questions to every founder, every engagement. The pattern in the answers is more useful than any individual answer.
- 01What would you do if you only had one team member for the next quarter?
- 02Which part of the business do you spend the most time thinking about that you do not actually need to be in?
- 03Where is the business growing in spite of itself?
- 04Where is the business stuck despite working harder on it?
- 05What is the smallest experiment that would change your mind about your current strategy?
What the diligence costs
We charge for the thirty days. Not a discovery call, an engagement. The fee is small relative to a real consulting scope, but it is non-trivial, and we are clear about it up front. Two reasons. First, paid diligence makes both sides serious. Founders who balk at paying for the diligence are usually founders who balk at paying for outcomes. Second, the diligence produces a real artifact: a written brief that the founder owns, whether they hire us for the engagement or not. If they take the brief and run the work themselves, we are fine with that. The brief was the deliverable.
What happens at day thirty-one
On day thirty-one we deliver one of three things. Either a written scope of work for the engagement we believe will move the business, which the founder can sign or walk away from. Or a written referral to a different operator who is better suited to the problem we found. Or a written 'do not engage anyone yet, here is what to fix internally first.' All three outcomes are valid, and all three have happened. The thirty days are diligence in the literal sense. We are looking for whether the engagement is the right move, not selling ourselves into it.