We give away the first conversation, and people occasionally assume that means it is a sales call with a friendlier name. It is not. By the end of it we will usually have told a prospective client which third of their plan to delete, and roughly once in four we will have talked them out of hiring us at all. That is not generosity. It is the cheapest way to find out whether the work is real.
The reason is that most failed engagements were unwinnable at the point of signature. The budget was set against a solution nobody had tested, or the decision the work was meant to serve had already been taken elsewhere, or two sponsors wanted opposite things and had agreed to postpone the argument. None of that is visible in a written brief. All of it is visible in ninety minutes of questions.
So we treat scoping as a deliverable in its own right, with an output: one paragraph naming the decision, the constraint and the person who owns it. If we cannot write that paragraph together, we have both learned something worth more than the fee. If we can, the rest of the engagement has something to point at when the scope starts to drift.
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