You finished the workshop. You decided to work with us. Now the calendar says nine days until kickoff and you are wondering, fairly, what is supposed to be happening in between.
The short answer
Between the scoping call and week one, three things happen, in this order: paper gets signed, access gets shared, and a working surface gets stood up. None of it is theater. Every step produces an artifact you keep.
If at any point in this window we cannot produce the next artifact, the engagement pauses on our side, not yours, and we say so out loud.
Day zero to day two: paper
The first 48 hours after the workshop end with three signed documents sitting in your shared folder:
- A one-page Statement of Work. What we are doing, what we are explicitly not doing, who owns each decision on your side, and what observable "done" looks like (Class C — written down where both sides can see it).
- A mutual NDA, only if your situation needs one. We do not push NDAs by default because most of our work product is public-by-design; if your data or constraints require one, we sign yours rather than forcing ours.
- A short data-handling appendix. Where your data will live, who on our side can see it, how long we keep it after the engagement ends, and how you revoke our access in one click. This is the document most agencies forget to write and most clients forget to ask for.
If your legal review pushes any of these past day three, that is not a problem — we hold the start date rather than pretending kickoff happened on paper.
Day three to day five: access
This is the part of the handoff that quietly determines whether week one is real or theatrical. You give us the minimum credentials we need to do the work, and not one credential more.
We will name, in writing, every system we are asking access to and why. Three categories, in plain language:
- Read-only first. Anything we can do with a read-only role, we ask for read-only. Dashboards, logs, exports — these almost never need write access during discovery.
- Scoped write where unavoidable. If we have to write into your systems (creating a form, deploying a page, adjusting a workflow), the credential is scoped to that surface and that surface only.
- No shared logins. Each person on our side gets their own account. If your platform does not support per-person accounts for vendors, we will tell you, and we will treat that as a finding about the platform rather than a workaround we hide.
The artifact you keep from this step is a single access map: every system, every role, every named human, every off-switch. You can use it the day we leave to remove us in under ten minutes.
Day six to day nine: the working surface
By the end of week zero, before kickoff officially begins, you can see the shared workspace we will operate in for the duration of the engagement. Concretely that means:
- A shared folder with the SOW, NDA (if any), data-handling appendix, and access map already in it.
- An empty ledger document where every claim, decision, and finding during the engagement will be logged with its evidence class — the same vocabulary of evidence-disciplined practice we use across the rest of our work (Class E — see the working classes A/B/C/E/F/U on /the-week-one-receipts).
- A short kickoff agenda, sent 48 hours before the meeting, listing every question we plan to ask and every decision we expect to surface.
None of this is novel. It is, however, written down before the engagement starts, which is the part most buyers find unusual.
What you should expect from us during this window
Two messages from us per week, no more. One on Monday with what we are working on, one on Thursday with what we have completed and what is blocked. No status calls unless you ask for one. No surprise invoices — the workshop fee is the only money that has changed hands until kickoff.
If we go quiet for more than a working week without a written reason, something is wrong. Tell us, and we will resolve it before any further billable work begins.
Why this matters
The handoff between sale and start is where most agency relationships get their first scar. We treat it as a real step with its own deliverables because the buyer should not have to guess whether anything is happening, and because every artifact produced in this window is one you keep when we are gone.
If you have not done the scoping call yet, the /workshop is where that conversation lives. If you have, and you are reading this in the gap between scope and kickoff, the /workshop-readiness-buyers-guide is what we will be working through with you in week one, and /the-week-one-receipts is the concrete list of what arrives in your shared folder by the end of it.