"AI consulting" sounds like a conference room and a slide deck. Ours starts with a phone call. Forty-five minutes, free. The call has one job: to work out whether a two-week AI Opportunity Assessment is the right next step for your company, and if it is, to scope it. People keep asking what the call is actually like, so here it is.
Who is on the call
You, and one of the three of us. If you want your operations lead or office manager on the line, bring them. The people who run the day usually know where the hours go better than the org chart does. We do not bring a deck. We bring a notebook and five questions.
The call is built for companies of twenty people or more. Past about twenty, work moves between hands, and the handoffs are where the time goes. Under twenty? Book it anyway. We will tell you straight if two weeks is more than you need.
We do not start with AI
The first thing we want to understand is how a job moves through your company. So we ask you to pick a real, recent one and walk us through it, from the moment the customer first reached out to the moment you got paid. Who took the call? What did they write down, and where? Who quoted it, who scheduled it, who did it, who billed it? Where did it sit, and for how long?
We are listening for the handoffs. Not the work itself. The spaces between the work, where a job waits on a callback, a signature, or a person who is out today.
The five questions
Somewhere in that walk-through we will ask, in one form or another:
- How many people, and how are they split between the office and the field, the floor, or the front desk? The answer tells us how many interviews the two weeks need, and at which levels.
- What gets typed more than once? The customer's name into the quote, then the schedule, then the invoice, then the spreadsheet. Every company has one of these. Most have four.
- What waits on one person? Approvals, pricing, a question only the owner can answer. When that person is out, what happens to the work?
- How do you know how the week is going? If the answer is "I ask around," that is a finding.
- If you could stop doing one thing tomorrow, what would it be?
That last one is the most useful question we have. Owners almost always know exactly what it is. They have just never had anyone ask, and never had anyone put a number on it.
What we listen for
Two things. First, the gap between how you describe the company and how the job actually moved. That gap is not a criticism. Every company past twenty people has one, because the owner cannot see every desk anymore. It is also where the money is, and it is exactly what the assessment is built to measure.
Second, the second occurrence. If something happens twice in one story, it happens every week. We have a rule about that.
What we are not doing
We are not demoing anything. We have no software to sell, so there is nothing to demo. We are not hunting for a place to put "AI." If the honest answer is a better spreadsheet, that is the answer, and the plan would say so. And we are not deciding anything on the call. Nobody signs anything at minute forty. You are deciding whether two weeks of our time inside your company is worth your team's time, and we are deciding the same thing.
What you leave with
By the end you will know three things. The two or three places we would look first, in plain language. What the two weeks would look like inside your company: how many interviews, at which levels, on which days, and the date the written plan lands. And a straight answer on whether we think you need it.
If the answer is yes and you want to go ahead, the next step is the kickoff, on site, where the delivery date is set in the room. Two weeks later you are holding the plan. It is yours to keep.
We charge for the thinking. Building is optional. Most companies ask us to build the first ninety days. Some hand the plan to their own people. Both are fine with us, and the plan is written so either works.
If you want to try it, the first call is free and takes forty-five minutes. We come to you anywhere in Northwest Indiana and Chicagoland.