Most consultancies open with a discovery call. We don't. Our first interaction with a prospective client is a four-minute form, and the next is a PDF in their inbox a few minutes later. There isn't a call between those two things, and there isn't one afterwards unless they ask for it.
We didn't get there by accident. The default opening, a thirty-minute call to 'understand your needs', has a problem we kept running into, and the form-and-PDF pair is what we built to replace it.
The discovery call has a job, and it isn’t the one in the title
On paper, the discovery call is where a consultancy works out whether it can help. In practice, it's where we work out what a prospective client can pay, and they work out how hard we'll push for the sale. Both sides are doing reconnaissance dressed as conversation.
Nobody comes out of that meeting feeling great. We've sat through enough of them, on both sides of the table, to know the shape: a polite first ten minutes, a probing middle, a noncommittal ending. The decision-relevant part of the call is usually the last three minutes, and most of those don't happen.
What we replaced it with
The form is four short steps. Name and email. Industry, size, role. Where the week disappears. That's it: about four minutes if you go quickly, six if you give the third question the answer it deserves.
What comes back is a personalised PDF: three or four ranked AI use cases for your business, a sensible first step for each, and a couple of dead-ends to avoid. No card, no call, no sequence. Just the document, in your inbox, to read or not.
What the audit isn’t
It isn't a 'lead magnet' with three pages of generic advice and a sales CTA at the end. It isn't a glossy questionnaire that scores you out of ten on AI readiness. It isn't a sequence: replying to it doesn't sign you up to anything, and not replying doesn't trigger a reminder.
It's the work we'd do in the first hour of a paid engagement, written down and given to you for nothing. The reason that hour is usually the most valuable part of an engagement is that it's where the messy, generic problem becomes specific. We do that work for everyone now, and let the reader decide what comes next.
Why we can give it away
Because most of the value of a first audit is in the structure: the ranking, the dead-ends, the recommended starting point. And the structure is something we've already built. The bespoke part is reading what you wrote in the form and applying it. That's quick when the pipeline behind it is good, and ours is.
If you find the audit useful and want help acting on it, you'll know where to find us. If you don't, you've still got a useful PDF, and we've still had the interaction we wanted: an honest, asynchronous one, before either of us is on a sales call.