Every first call I run starts the same way. I don't ask what software you use. I ask what your week looks like, because the work worth automating is hiding in the answer.
Here are the questions, rewritten so you can ask them of yourself before the call. You don't need all ten. Three or four honest answers are usually enough to find the job.
The ten
- Walk through a normal week. Where does the time actually go?
- If the workload doubled tomorrow, what breaks first?
- Where are you the bottleneck? What can't happen until you personally touch it?
- What grows in lockstep with every new client, order or project?
- Which tasks, if they disappeared, would let you take on more work without hiring?
- What do you put off the longest each week?
- Where does information get typed twice? Email to spreadsheet, form to CRM, invoice to accounting.
- What do you check by hand that you wish would just tell you when something changed?
- What was the last thing that slipped through the cracks, and why?
- If you got five hours a week back, what would you spend them on?
The follow-ups that matter
An answer to any of those is a process. Once there's a process on the table, I ask the same small questions every time:
- What happens after that step?
- Who usually handles it?
- How long does it take, and how often does it happen?
- Where does the information live right now?
- What happens when it goes wrong?
Then the one that decides it: what's the decision in the middle, and could someone else make it with a checklist? If the decision fits on a checklist, software can run it. If it doesn't, a person should keep it, and I'll say so.
What to listen for
When people describe their week, the same phrases point at the same kind of work:
- Every Monday I... Recurring work. It runs on a schedule, so software can too.
- I copy it into... Data typed twice. The cheapest fix there is.
- I have to remember to... A missing trigger. Something should tell you, not your memory.
- I just check to make sure... Watching for a change. Software can do the watching and tell you when it happens.
- It's only a few minutes. Said twice, it's never a few minutes. It's a few minutes, every day, for everyone.
Bring one
Pick the task with the biggest number: hours a week, times the people who do it. Write down what happens before and after it. That's the whole agenda for a first call, and it's enough to tell whether it's worth building.
