Before we build any digital employee for a client, we run a two hour discovery session. It is the most important two hours in the entire engagement. Get it right and the build flows from there. Get it wrong and you spend the next six weeks fixing assumptions.
What we ask.
The questions seem simple. They are not. Most owners answer some of these for the first time in their career.
The work questions.
- If you had to describe how your business actually makes money in one sentence, what is that sentence?
- What is the work your team does that you wish they did less of?
- What is the work that only one person in your team knows how to do?
- If that person left tomorrow, what would break first?
The cost questions.
- Where do you currently spend money on people doing work that does not need a person?
- What service or product do you turn down because you do not have capacity to deliver it?
- What did your last bad hire cost you, all in?
The risk questions.
- What is the question a client has asked you in the last month that you did not have a clean answer to?
- What is the regulation you keep meaning to look into?
- What number in your business is currently older than two weeks?
Why these questions.
They are designed to find the gap between where the business actually loses time and money, and where the owner thinks it does. The two are almost never the same.
Owners tend to fixate on the visible problems: the slow sales cycle, the missed deadline, the client who churned. Those are real. But they are usually symptoms. The actual leak is somewhere in the questions above. Usually three or four of them at once.
The right first hire is the one that closes the biggest gap, not the one with the most exciting job title.
What we do with the answers.
By the end of the two hours we usually have:
- A clear picture of the three or four roles that would have the biggest impact
- An honest read on which one the team is ready to actually adopt
- A rough sequence: what gets built first, what gets built second, what waits
- A list of integrations and access we will need
- A first draft of how we will measure success in 90 days
What we do not do.
We do not sell you on a role. If the discovery shows you do not need a Sales Guy yet, we will say that, even if you came in asking for one. We would rather build less and have it work than build more and have it sit unused.
If you want to run this discovery with us, the only ask is two uninterrupted hours and the willingness to answer the awkward questions honestly. We do the rest.
