Consulting · The Strategy Call
Thirty minutes.No pitch.Usually no invoice either.
The call exists so I can tell you which of the paid engagements you need (including when the answer is none of them) and so you can find out whether I am worth listening to before any money moves.
- Free
- 30 minutes
- Remote · video
- Recording and summary sent after
- No obligation, no follow-up sequence
Who books this
Three people get their thirty minutes back with interest.
The call works when you arrive with something specific that has stopped. It works badly as an introduction to AI in general, and the free course is better at that than I am.
01
You have something half-built and stalled
Solo founders · small teams
The demo works and the real version does not. You have rewritten the same module three times and you cannot tell any more whether the problem is the tool, the scope, or the fact that nobody ever wrote down what done means.
02
You bought the licences and nothing changed
Team leads · heads of product
Seat count went up, cycle time did not. Two people love it, everyone else opens it once a fortnight, and somebody upstairs is about to ask what the spend bought. You need a read on whether that is an adoption problem or a workflow one before you commit to fixing either.
03
You are not sure the problem is AI at all
Operators · business owners
You have a suspicion that the tooling is a distraction from something duller: pricing, positioning, or one hire you have been avoiding. Thirty minutes with somebody who has no incentive to agree with you is a cheap way to test that.
When not to book it.
Four situations where the call wastes your time, listed so you can rule yourself out without an email exchange.
- You want a free consultation to hand your own engineers as a specification. That is a reasonable thing to want and it is the sprint, not the call.
- You want somebody to build it and hand it over. I do not take agency work, and a call about that ends in the first five minutes.
- You want an introduction to AI in general. The free course covers more ground in an hour than I can in thirty minutes, and it costs the same.
- You want a decision you have already made validated. I will probably disagree with it, which is fine, but it is not what you came for.
Why this call exists
You have had this call before and it ended in a proposal.
Almost everyone who books this has already sat through two or three free consultations. The pattern is familiar enough to be a genre: twenty minutes of discovery questions that are really qualification questions, a diagnosis vague enough to fit any answer you gave, and a deck within forty-eight hours.
The reason it is done that way is that a free call is expensive for the person giving it, so it has to convert. I have made my peace with a low conversion rate instead, because the calls that do not convert are the ones people describe accurately to other people. Five clients so far, and more than five calls that ended with me saying there was nothing here for me to sell.
The cost of not having the call is subtler. It is not the money, because there is none. It is another quarter of the same loop: build, discover the specification was incomplete, rewrite, conclude the tool is not ready. That loop is survivable for a long time, which is precisely what makes it expensive.
The thirty minutes
What the call is, minute by minute.
It is the same shape every time. Knowing the shape in advance is worth about five minutes of it.
00–05
You talk, I do not
What you are shipping, where it stopped, and what you have already tried. If you sent the three answers back by email beforehand, this part is a confirmation rather than a briefing and we get the five minutes back.
05–15
I ask the awkward questions
Mostly about what is written down and what is not. Who decides done, what happens when the answer comes back wrong, and how long the last thing you shipped actually took against what you told the board. This is the part people find uncomfortable and it is where the diagnosis comes from.
15–25
I tell you what I would do
A direct read on whether the bottleneck is specification, scope, or genuine engineering capacity: the three look identical from the inside and want completely different responses. Then the one workflow I would change this week, specifically enough that you could start on Monday without me.
25–30
We decide whether there is a next step
Sometimes that is a sprint, sometimes it is the free course, and often it is nothing. I will say which I think it is once, and I do not ask twice; there is no follow-up sequence attached to this call.
What you leave with
Free, and still itemised.
In the thirty minutes
- A direct read on whether your bottleneck is spec, scope, or genuinely engineering capacity
- The specific first workflow I would change this week
- An honest answer on whether you need me at all
- Recording and written summary afterwards
What it is not: a code review, a technical audit, or a written proposal. Thirty minutes is enough to name the bottleneck and the first move against it. It is not enough to plan a quarter, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling the second call.
The price
There is no price, which is the awkward part.
A free offer invites the obvious question, so here is the answer plainly. This call is how I find the five or six engagements a year I actually want, and the filter works better when it is honest than when it is aggressive. You are not paying with a mailing list signup either: the newsletter is a separate, optional thing you can ignore entirely.
Before you book
The four things people ask first.
Is this actually free, or is it a sales call with a nicer name?
My problem is too small or too obvious to take a slot.
I cannot show you our product or our code.
I am nowhere near your time zone.
One decision
Book it, or decide not to. Do not sit on it for another quarter.
Thirty minutes, no pitch, recording and written summary afterwards. The worst realistic outcome is that I tell you your bottleneck is not the thing you thought it was and you spend nothing finding that out.
P.S. If you are not going to answer the three questions in the confirmation email, book the call anyway, but expect the first ten minutes to go on briefing rather than on answers. The people who get the most out of this arrive with a specific stalled thing and no ambition to make a good impression.