What would you charge for the first meeting?
For your own business, or as a service you charge other businesses like yours for.
Nobody runs this lab yet. Take it, give it your hours and your prices, and it is yours.
The company, as described in the first hour
Metalwork subcontractor, 34 people, two sites. Sells to eleven industrial accounts, four of which are eighty percent of turnover. No IT staff, one external provider on the network.
Where the time goes, in their words
| TaskTask | WhoWho | Hours a weekHours a week |
|---|---|---|
| Writing quotes | 4 people | 6 each |
| Sorting supplier mail | 1 person | 5 |
| Answering customer questions | 2 people | 4 each |
| Chasing delivery notes | 1 person | 3 |
What they have that can be used
Eleven years of quotes on a shared drive, named by client and date. Their supplier emails in one mailbox. That is more than most companies this size arrive with.
What they do not have
A clean support archive. Answers are split between two mailboxes and a private one nobody wants to open. Written down here rather than discovered in week three.
The sentence to keep
Asked what would make this worth it: not saving money, being able to answer a quote the same day. That is the yardstick for everything after.
| Task | Hours a month | Material ready | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| Writing quotes | 104 | 11 years, well named | First |
| Sorting supplier mail | 22 | One mailbox, clean | Second |
| Answering customers | 35 | Scattered, two mailboxes | Later |
| Chasing delivery notes | 13 | Paper, not scanned | Not now |
+ 1 more rows
Answering customers is the second biggest pot of hours and it comes fourth, because the material is not there. Hours alone would have ranked it second and the project would have stalled in week three.
Where it pays first
Quote writing. Four people spend around six hours a week each rewriting the same three paragraphs. That is the shortest path to a visible result.
Sequence and cost
| StepStep | EffortEffort | ReturnReturn |
|---|---|---|
| Quote assistant | 3 days | 20 hours a month |
| Supplier mail sorting | 2 days | 6 hours a month |
| Support answers | later | needs clean archives |
Support comes third on purpose: their archive is scattered across two mailboxes and a shared drive. Fix the source before automating it.
What is proposed
A quote assistant, built on your eleven years of quotes, that produces a first draft your estimator corrects rather than writes. Nothing goes to a client without a human sending it.
Scope, in three lines
| PhasePhase | What is deliveredWhat is delivered | WhenWhen |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Setup | Archive read, assistant built, 3 estimators trained | Weeks 1 to 2 |
| 2. Real use | 20 quotes produced in the tool, corrections captured | Weeks 3 to 6 |
| 3. Handover | Written procedure, one person able to adjust it | Week 7 |
Price
7 200 euros for phases 1 to 3, half at the start, half at handover. Running cost after that, between 40 and 90 euros a month depending on volume, billed to you directly, not through me.
What is not in scope
Supplier mail and customer answers. They are in the roadmap and not in this proposal, on purpose: the support archive needs cleaning first and that is your work, not mine.
How you would know it worked
You said it yourself: answering a quote the same day. Today the average is four days. If it is not under one day by week six, phase 3 is not billed.
An ai audit in a small company rarely fails on the technology. It fails when the report reads like the one next door: the same generic use cases, the same promised gain, no trace of the company that paid for it. An independent consultant already has a grid, cases and prices, usually in a spreadsheet and in their head. This lab would carry that diagnostic from one engagement to the next, keeping the use cases that actually worked at your previous clients rather than the ones on a vendor slide.
Put there once, read by every magik.
Put there once by you, read by every magik, corrected when reality moves. Full on day one, unlike the collections below.
Worth more in month six than in week one.
The collections belong to the lab, not to any single magik. Every magik reads them and every run adds to them, which is why this lab is worth more in month six than in week one.
| Sector | Use case | Effort | Priority |
|---|---|---|---|
| Manufacturing | Answering tenders | medium | high |
| Wholesale | Product sheets | low | high |
| Services | Meeting notes | low | medium |
Invented for this page. Your Use cases that worked collection starts empty and fills as you work.
It wears your name, not ours.
The same lab, under your name, your colours and your logo. Your customers never see ours.
AskMOJOOn the Pro plan, and not needed to take a lab. A fully bespoke theme exists as an upgrade, hand built rather than self-serve.
Web searchAnd whatever you already use: any tool available through an API or an MCP server, connected with your own account.
A tool built for exactly your job, and only that, will go deeper at that one job. This is for the jobs nothing covers, or the ones spread across three tools today.
A structured look at how a company works today, where a machine would actually pay off, what it would cost and in what order to do it. It is a consulting deliverable, not a tool inspection, and what makes it worth paying for is the judgement in the ranking.
Your rate, on your terms. The lab holds the intake, the layout and the consistency between engagements, it does not set a price and it would be wrong to suggest one: what a diagnostic is worth depends on the company in front of you and on what you can defend in the room.
There are, and this idea certifies nothing. If your method follows a framework, that framework is what you put in as your grid and the deliverable follows it. What the lab brings is that the same grid gets applied the same way on the tenth engagement as on the first.
The way you bill an audit today: it is your analysis, your grid, your recommendations. The lab holds the intake, the layout and the consistency from one engagement to the next. What the client pays for is your judgement about their business, and that is what you defend in the room.
You put it into your lab, which is yours and exportable. That is precisely what makes two diagnostics differ when two consultants start from the same idea: the grid, the cases you can cite and your own packages are what set you apart.
Then the roadmap reads as a work plan rather than a shopping list: what would pay off in this company, in what order, for what effort. The intake is built to be filled in by an owner describing their week, not by an IT manager.
Both, and they are not for the same reader. The checklist is your working document during the interviews; the report is what the client keeps, with the ranking and the reasoning. Handing over the checklist as if it were the deliverable is how a diagnostic stops being billable.
A tool built for exactly independent consultants, and only that, will go deeper at that one job. This lab is for the jobs no tool covers, or the ones spread across three tools today, and it runs under your name.
Every audience is still open.
Nobody has taken a square on this idea yet. You declare your audience when you take the lab (“roofers in Brittany”, “plumbers around Paris”), and two people can start from the same idea on two different audiences without getting in each other’s way.
Applies Consulting Studio to this job.
And it wears your name, not ours.
The bundle describes a lab that does not exist yet : the jobs it would do, and an example of each output.
Open Knowledge Format : plain markdown, re-importable into any agent. No account, no lock-in.
A messy first call becomes one page the client reads, corrects and signs. The scope stops moving.
Google Sheets
GmailYour guests get the code, the wifi and the right restaurant at 11pm. You get your evening back.
Web searchGmailStill comparing tools? Best AI for research.