Twenty minutes. Tell me where this has to get to.
Free. No deck, no pitch, no follow-up sequence. If I don’t think I’m the right thing, I’ll say so on the call.
Or just write to matt@matthewkantor.com.
What we actually talk about.
Not what you want. Everyone wants the number to go up. Where you want the company to be in two years, and then what you’ve already tried toward it, what you’ve already paid for, and what happened.
Then I do what I always do: make an assumption and try to disprove it. Why hasn’t that moved? Because of this. Fine, why did that happen? The real picture lives at the bottom of that chain, and twenty minutes is usually enough to get two or three links down it.
Questions worth having answers to.
Not a test. Most people running a company this size can’t answer at least one, and that’s useful information rather than a failing grade.
- 1What did you make last month from customers you already had, versus new ones?
- 2Which of your top twenty accounts spent less this year than last?
- 3Of everything you lost last quarter, how much died for the same reason?
- 4What’s your biggest line item that you’d struggle to defend if I asked what it returned?
- 5What is your team doing by hand every week that exists only because two systems don’t talk?
The honest part.
Yes, the paid version of this is The Next Version. The twenty minutes isn’t a trailer for it. If the call says you don’t need one, I’ll tell you that, and you can repeat it to anyone.
I ask the same questions whether or not there’s an engagement at the end, because the answers are the only way either of us finds out if there is one.