What to have ready for your discovery meeting

The discovery meeting is thirty minutes. It is free, and there is nothing to buy at the end of it. The only way to waste it is to spend twenty of those minutes on questions you could have answered in five before the call.

You will get a short intake form by email after you book, which covers the basics. This is the rest. None of it is homework you have to hand in. It is the material that makes the conversation about your business instead of about generalities.

If you get through half of this list, the call will be better than most.

Five things worth writing down

Rough answers beat exact ones. A guess you can explain is more useful than a number you spent an hour finding.

1. How customers find you today. Not the theory, the actual last ten jobs. Which came from a referral, which from a Google search, which from a sign or a truck, which from a repeat customer, which from a directory or a lead service you pay for. If you do not know, say so, because that answer is itself a finding.
2. Every tool you use, and who owns the login. The website, the domain registrar, the email, the Google Business Profile, whatever you invoice with, whatever you schedule with, the CRM if there is one, the phone system, the ad accounts. Beside each one write the name of the person or company who actually controls it. This is the question that most often turns up something the owner did not know, and it matters, because you cannot fix what you cannot get into.
3. What you pay every month for software and marketing. Pull the last statement or scroll the card charges for one month. Software subscriptions, the website vendor, the lead services, ad spend, anything on autopay. You are looking for a total and for anything on the list you forgot you had.
4. The three things that eat your week. The tasks you do over and over that feel like they should not need you. Chasing payments. Retyping the same quote. Answering the same three customer questions. Rebuilding a schedule after one cancellation. Write down three, in the order they annoy you.
5. A number you wish you knew. Every owner has one. How many leads actually turn into jobs. What a job really costs to run. Which service line makes money. How many people call and never hear back. Bring the question, not the answer.

Gather the access, or at least the names

You do not need to send anyone a password, and you should not send one over email to anybody, us included.

What helps is knowing where things live. If the website was built by a company that went quiet three years ago, that is worth saying out loud on the call. If the Google Business Profile is verified to a former employee’s personal email, that is a real constraint and it changes what can happen and in what order.

The pattern we see most often is a business that owns its domain, does not own its website, and cannot log in to its own Google profile. Each of those is fixable. Each takes a different amount of time, and knowing which ones apply before we start is the difference between a plan and a guess.

What not to prepare

Do not prepare a pitch.

This is not a sales meeting in either direction. You are not being evaluated, and you do not need to present your business in its best light. The opposite is more useful. The parts that are held together with tape are the interesting parts, and describing them accurately is the fastest way to a useful audit.

A few other things you can skip.

• Do not clean anything up first. The instinct to fix the website before showing it to anyone is a common one, and it only delays the call. Whatever state it is in is the state we need to see, and the fix list is the deliverable.
• Do not research solutions ahead of time. You do not need to arrive with an opinion about which CRM or which booking tool. Working that out is our job, and arriving with a preferred tool tends to narrow the conversation early.
• Do not build a budget. Nothing is priced on this call, and any number you set now would be set against a scope that does not exist yet.
• Do not gather everything perfectly. A partial answer to all five questions is worth more than a complete answer to one.

What actually happens on the call

Thirty minutes, on Zoom or in person around Grand Junction. We come in having read your intake, so we start from your situation rather than from introductions.

We ask about what is working, what is not, and what you would change if it were free. We ask about how customers find you, where time leaks, and what happens between a phone call and a paid invoice. We take notes. The call is recorded so nothing gets lost.

At the end of it, you do not have to decide anything or sign anything. The next step happens on our end.

What happens after

Within a day or two you get a written Diagnostic Audit and a presentation built around your business, at no charge. It lays out what we found, sorted into what to do first, what belongs in the next six months, and what can wait. Every item has a defined scope. There is a walkthrough of exactly what that document contains on the what you get page.

Then there is a strategy briefing, an hour, where we go through it together and build the scope live. You choose what is in and what is out, item by item, and the total moves as you choose. The whole engagement is laid out step by step on the services page.

You can move forward with all of it, some of it, or none of it. The audit is yours either way.

The half hour is worth what you bring to it. Five rough answers and an honest account of what is broken beats a polished presentation of your business every time.

When you are ready, book a free discovery meeting. 30 minutes, no obligation.