000-000-0000 · closed Sundays
Ninety minutes, no fee
Ninety minutes, no fee, and no obligation on either side. It is not a sales meeting with a different name: at the end of it you get our actual opinion on whether this is worth doing, and about one in four of them ends with us saying it is not.
You talk and we ask questions, and the questions are duller than people expect. What did last week go on. Where did last year's revenue come from. What happens to an enquiry that arrives on a Tuesday morning. What have you already tried and what stopped it. Almost nothing in the first hour is about aspiration, because aspiration is the one thing every owner can describe fluently and it is rarely where the problem is.
At about the seventy-minute mark we say what we think, which is the part that makes this meeting different from a sales meeting with the same name. Sometimes that is: this is a piece of work and here is roughly its shape and size. Sometimes it is: you have a delivery problem and you have been treating it as a sales problem for two years. And about one time in four it is: there is nothing here worth paying us for, here is the thing we would do in your position, and it does not involve us.
Nobody leaves with a proposal. If there is a piece of work, it arrives in writing within a week, at which point you can read it without anybody sitting opposite you.
Nothing prepared. A meeting somebody has spent a weekend getting ready for tells us about the weekend rather than about the business, and the tidied version of a business is the version that hides what is wrong with it. If your last set of accounts and a rough sense of your busiest and quietest months are to hand, that helps; if they are not, it does not matter for a first meeting.
Bring whoever will actually have to do the work if anything comes of it. Owners often come alone and then have to sell the whole conversation second-hand to the person who runs the floor, which is a worse version of the meeting delivered by somebody with no notes.
Because a quarter of them end with us saying no. A firm that converted every first meeting into an engagement would have to charge for the meeting, or would have to stop saying no — and the second of those is what usually happens. Ninety minutes is a real cost to us and it buys the ability to be straight at the end of it.
Either side can stop at the end of any week. Either side can stop at the end of any week. You pay for the days worked, you keep everything written so far, and there is no notice period and no termination fee.
The three things people worry about
No. We will sign a confidentiality agreement before the meeting if you want one, and we would rather sign yours than ask you to read ours. Nothing about a client appears on this website: every example here is a composite.
Not for a first meeting. Have it at our office on 61st Street. It is a perfectly normal thing to want and it is half of what the meeting room is for.
You will be told what we think, and if there is a piece of work you will get a two-page proposal a week later with the arithmetic printed on it. The rates are on this website already, so there is nothing to reveal dramatically.
A partner day is $2,200, a blended day is $1,800 and a consultant day is $1,400. Every project on this site is a number of days at one of those three rates, and the fee range printed against it is exactly that multiplication. The smallest piece of work here is four days.
Ninety minutes, no fee, no obligation, and no proposal at the end of it — you get an opinion. Roughly one in four ends with us saying that we are not the right thing for this, which is why we can afford to give the time away.
Mostly yours. You cannot follow a job around a spreadsheet. First meetings can be at our office on 61st Street if you would rather your staff did not watch, which is a normal thing to want.
$2,200 a partner day · ninety minutes free · about one in four we talk out of it
Four minutes and twelve questions, and it produces a summary of what your answers suggest. People who bring one to a first meeting tend to get more out of the ninety minutes, because the first twenty are not spent establishing what the business does.