Most firms treat scoping as a phase you pay for. Discovery, workshops, an opportunity matrix, a document at the end of each. We treat it as a deadline. You get on a 15-minute call, and a proposal lands in your inbox within 48 hours. One page, one number, fixed scope.
The deadline isn't a sales gimmick. It's the discipline. If we can't scope your process in 48 hours, we don't understand it well enough to quote it — and neither does anyone charging you for three months to find out.
Why the clock is the feature
A long discovery phase looks like rigour. It's usually the opposite. The work expands to fill the time, the document grows, and at the end you still don't have a price you can act on — you have a recommendation to scope the next phase.
The 48-hour clock kills that. It forces us to find the one process worth building and say no to the rest. It filters out discovery theatre on our side, and it filters out tyre-kickers on yours: a team that can't make 15 minutes to describe its most painful process isn't ready to fix it.
A long discovery phase looks like rigour. It's usually the opposite. The clock forces us to be specific or admit we can't be.
What actually happens in those 48 hours
It's less than you'd think, on purpose.
- The 15-minute call. You tell us the one process that hurts most. We're not collecting requirements — we're finding the bottleneck. If you name five, we help you pick the one.
- The process walkthrough. We get you to describe how the work runs today, in one shared doc. Real steps, real exceptions, the "yeah but on Wednesdays we…" parts. Where it lives, who touches it, where it breaks.
- The system access review. We look at what you already run — the tools, the inboxes, the spreadsheets that are secretly the database. This tells us what we can build against and what we'd have to work around.
- Scoping the one process. We draw the line around exactly what we'll build. The most common path, end to end, plus a clear escalation route for the exceptions we won't try to automate on day one. Scope is a boundary, not a wishlist.
- Pricing it. We size the build against a tier and quote it fixed. No hourly estimate, no range, no "depending on." One number you can take to whoever signs.
Two short async questions usually sit in the middle of that — the things we can't close out live. You answer them when you have a minute. We don't book a second meeting to ask them.
What the one-page proposal contains
One page. Not a deck. It says three things:
- One number. The fixed price for the scoped work. Not a range, not an estimate that moves.
- The fixed scope. The exact process we'll build, the path it covers, and what's explicitly out — so there's no argument later about what "done" meant.
- The timeline. Which tier this is and how long it runs. SIGNAL, one to two weeks. SPRINT, two to four. OVERHAUL, four to eight. We commit to it upfront.
That's the whole document. If you can't read a proposal in two minutes, it's hiding something.
What we deliberately refuse
The 48-hour scope is defined as much by what it leaves out.
No long discovery phase. We don't sell a study that recommends a study. No hourly estimates — hourly billing rewards the side that takes longer, and we're not interested in being slow. No committee cycles: we scope against the person who feels the pain, not a steering group that has to ratify the question before anyone can answer it.
The proposal is fixed before we start, and it doesn't move unless you add scope. Everything inside it, we hold ourselves to. The only thing that changes the number is you asking for something new.
The honest version
Scoping fast isn't cutting corners. It's refusing to charge you to think out loud. The work we'd do in a three-month discovery and the work we do in 48 hours produce the same useful artefact: a clear picture of the one thing worth building and what it costs. One of them just doesn't bill you for the privilege of being unsure.
Book the 15 minutes. Read the page. The number is the number.