Most agencies will not tell you when to walk away. We will. This post is the bouncer at our own door, and it is going to cost us leads on purpose.
The workshop is twelve weeks of measurable build work. It produces receipts, falsifiers, and exit-ready artifacts you can take to another team if we ever stop earning the seat. That shape is right for some buyers and wrong for others. Below is the list of "wrong" — and what we recommend instead.
You want a guaranteed outcome in writing
If the procurement bar is "tell me in advance exactly what the model will do and sign for it," we are not your shop. We publish falsifiers (Class C — every workshop engagement ships with a documented falsifier set in the engagement folder), which means we tell you in advance what would prove the build wrong. We do not pre-sign outcomes we have not measured yet. If you need a fixed deliverable warranty, hire a systems integrator with a fixed-scope SOW and a fixed-scope price. You will pay more and learn less, and that is a legitimate trade.
You want the cheapest seat license you can find
The workshop is not a per-seat SaaS rollout. We do project-level fees with the ledger published to you. If "cheapest per-user-per-month" is the buying criterion, you are in a different market — go price the seat-licensed copilots and pick the one whose lock-in cost you understand.
You want a black box that "just works" and never asks you a question
We build with the operator in the loop. Every override is logged. Every refusal is logged. If your team's stated preference is to never look inside the system and never touch a gate, the workshop will feel like homework. That is fine — but buy a managed service, not us.
You are buying to replace a person quietly
This is the cleanest disqualifier. If the underlying brief is "use AI to remove a named human from the org chart and don't tell them," do not book the workshop. We will find out in week one, because the people whose work we are touching are in the room when we map it. We have walked away from this brief before and we will again.
You need clinical outcomes
Our work touches learning and human-in-the-loop process design. It is not therapy, not medical, not a clinical intervention. If you are looking for clinical results, the workshop is the wrong instrument and the wrong vendor.
You are between roles and looking for a job, not a build
This one is not really a disqualifier — it is a redirect. The workshop is a B2B engagement; we cannot turn it into individual career coaching. If that is where you actually are, read Themesis on three strategies to improve job search success (Class E — published external work by Themesis): our one-line frame is that defining your concrete strengths, working the weak-tie network, and telling a real story about your work beats mass-applying. That is good, durable advice and it is free. Come back to the workshop when you are buying for a team.
What "right fit" actually looks like
A right-fit buyer has a real workflow, a real team touching it, a willingness to look at the ledger every week, and a tolerance for the answer "we tried it, here is the falsifier that fired, here is what we changed." If that sentence reads as a feature rather than a bug, we should talk.
If you are still unsure after this list, the Workshop Readiness Buyer's Guide walks the decision in more detail, and what we do not claim is the matching list of capability boundaries we publish on every engagement.
When you are ready, book the workshop. And if any of the disqualifiers above describe you, tell us anyway — we would rather lose the sale than waste your quarter.