If you sign with us on a Monday, here is what is sitting in your shared folder on Friday. Not a slide deck. Four working documents you can read, mark up, and use to fire us.
Why we publish the receipts before you ask
Most agency engagements start with a kickoff and end with a surprise. We do the opposite. The first week is spent producing four artifacts that make the whole engagement legible — to you, to your team, and to anyone who replaces us later. If we cannot produce them in seven days, that itself is a finding and we will say so.
The four artifacts are: a scope memo, an evidence-class baseline, a falsifier list, and a draft exit plan.
1. The scope memo
A single page. What we are doing, what we are explicitly not doing, who on your side owns each decision, and what "done" looks like in observable terms (Class C — configuration written down where both sides can see it). The scope memo is signed by both of us before any billable work past discovery starts.
If a scope memo cannot fit on one page, the engagement is not yet understood well enough to begin. We will say that out loud and keep working on the memo until it fits.
2. The evidence-class baseline
This is where we depart from how most agencies write status reports. Every claim we will make about your project for the duration of the engagement gets tagged with an evidence class up front:
- A — empirical, observed in a working session
- B — verified in code or by inspection of an artifact
- C — configured and written down where both sides can see it
- E — supported by an outside expert source we name and link
- F — falsifier present (we have written down what would prove this wrong)
- U — unverified, included for transparency, will be promoted or dropped
We baseline this on day three so that by Friday you already know which of our opening claims are A-grade, which are still U-grade, and what we have to do to move them up. The classes themselves are not our invention — they are the working vocabulary of evidence-disciplined practice (Class E — see the public methodology notes on /trust-receipts-standard).
3. The falsifier list
For each working hypothesis in the engagement, we write down — in plain language — the specific observation that would prove us wrong. If we say "this new intake flow will reduce dropped leads by half within six weeks," the falsifier is "after six weeks the dropped-lead rate is within ten percent of baseline, or worse." We commit to the falsifier in writing before we run the experiment.
This is uncomfortable on purpose. It is also the single fastest way to tell whether a vendor actually believes what they are selling you.
4. The exit-plan draft
The most under-published artifact in agency work. By Friday of week one, you have a one-page draft that answers: if this engagement ended next Monday, what would the client need to keep running, who else could pick it up, and what would it cost. We update this document at every milestone. It is yours, not ours, and it stays yours when the engagement ends.
If the exit plan looks expensive or sticky, that is a finding about how we have scoped the work, and we will rescope rather than hide it.
Why this matters
You should not have to take any of this on faith. The whole point of a week-one receipt is that on Saturday morning, with the four documents open on your desk, you can decide for yourself whether to continue — without needing to ask us for permission, a slide, or a status call.
If that posture is the one you want from the people you hire, the /workshop is where we figure out whether we can actually deliver it for your specific situation. The /workshop-readiness-buyers-guide is the short read first if you want to know what we will ask you for in return.
The full standard the four artifacts are written against lives on /trust-receipts-standard. The standard is public so that other people can hold us to it — and so that you can fork it for your other vendors.