What does a first conversation cost?

The reason it works this way is that the useful conversation and the sales conversation are different activities. A sales conversation establishes what you might buy. A diagnostic one establishes what the problem is, and those frequently produce different answers. A business arriving convinced it needs a new website often has a positioning problem that a new website would faithfully reproduce.

Expect questions rather than a presentation. What you sell and who buys it, what you charge, where work has come from so far, and what specifically prompted you to get in touch. Those four answers shape any sensible recommendation, and a conversation that skips them to describe services is selling something assembled in advance.

Expect to be told if the answer is something other than hiring me. Sometimes the constraint is reviews, or pricing, or that the enquiries arriving are being handled slowly, and none of those are solved by a project. Saying so costs a potential engagement and it is the point of the conversation rather than a failure of it.

Come with the actual problem rather than a specification, since arriving with a decision already made frequently means arriving with a solution to the wrong thing. Describing what is not working produces a better conversation than describing what you want built, and it is considerably more useful if the two turn out to differ.

It usually takes half an hour to forty minutes, by phone or video, and there is no preparation required. Bringing your current numbers helps if you have them, particularly where enquiries come from and roughly what a customer is worth, and their absence is itself a finding rather than an obstacle.

Nothing follows automatically. If there is a piece of work worth doing, it gets described with a price and you decide. If there is not, that is stated. There is no sequence of follow up messages designed to convert somebody who said no, and a business that concluded the fit was wrong is not pursued.

Ask whatever you want during it, including questions about how the work operates, what could go wrong, and what you would be committing to. The conversation is more useful when it runs in both directions, and a provider unwilling to answer awkward questions before an engagement will not become more forthcoming during one.

Then take a few days rather than deciding on the call. Anything worth doing will still be worth doing on Thursday, and a recommendation that requires an immediate answer is a signal about the person making it rather than about the urgency of your situation.

Bring somebody else if the decision involves them, since a conversation with one partner that has to be relayed to another loses most of its detail. Both hearing the same reasoning at the same time removes a round of internal discussion and prevents the version where each remembers something different.

Expect notes afterward rather than only a verbal summary, since anything worth discussing is worth having in writing. A short written recap of what was established and what was recommended is what you refer to when deciding, and its absence means comparing providers from memory.

Ask what happens next before ending it, since a clear answer about timing, cost, and what you would need to provide is part of what the conversation is for. Vagueness at that point tends to persist into the engagement.