Most agencies want you to say yes. We would rather you say no early than say yes wrongly.
This page exists so you can self-screen before you ever pay us a dollar. If by the end you decide we are not the right fit, that is the page doing its job. If by the end you can name a problem, an owner, the data, and an exit condition, we should probably talk.
Who the SWU workshop is for
The workshop is for an operator who has already lost time and money to a generic consulting motion and does not want to lose more. You have a real business problem that lives somewhere in your operation — intake, scheduling, follow-up, reporting, the shape of a decision your team makes thirty times a week. You suspect tooling can help. You are tired of demos.
You want receipts, not a deck. You want the work to be inspectable while it is happening, not narrated at you after the fact. You want a partner who will tell you when the answer is "this does not need software, it needs a checklist."
If that is you, keep reading.
Who it is not for
We are not the right shop if you want a flagship-vendor logo on a slide deck. We are not the right shop if the goal is to look modern at a board meeting. We are not the right shop if you want a vendor who will quietly agree with whoever speaks loudest in the room.
We are also not the right shop for clinical work of any kind. Our practice is informed by how humans actually learn under stress — we design the sessions so the room is safe to think in — but the workshop is non-clinical, non-therapeutic, and is not a treatment for anything. If that is what you need, you need a clinician, not us.
The four readiness signals
We will not run a paid engagement unless all four are present. This is the gate (Class C — it is a configuration of our intake, not a slogan).
1. The problem is named. A specific operational pain that someone in the room can describe in one sentence without using the word "transformation." Example: "Our intake form drops 40% of leads on mobile and we don't know which ones." Not: "We want to use AI."
2. The owner is named. A single human inside your org whose calendar will hold the time, whose authority covers the decision, and who will read the working notes. Not a committee. Not "the team." A person. If no one is willing to be named, the engagement will fail (Class F — we have seen it fail every time the owner slot is empty).
3. The data is accessible. Whatever evidence is needed to tell whether the change worked — form-fill logs, CRM exports, a screen-recording of the workflow, a dashboard credential — is reachable by the named owner without a six-week IT ticket. Inaccessible data is not "we'll get it later." It is a hard stop on the readiness check.
4. An exit condition exists. A sentence of the form "we will know we are done when X is true and we can stop paying SWU." If no such sentence can be written, the engagement is open-ended by construction and that is the failure mode of every bad consulting deal on earth. We want you to be able to fire us.
These four are how we falsify our own fit before taking your money (Class F). If you cannot articulate them on a thirty-minute call, we will say so on that call.
What the 30-minute scoping call actually covers
It is thirty minutes, on video, with one of us, free. We will share notes back to you in writing within twenty-four hours whether or not we move forward — that is the receipt (Class C — written into our intake process, not a promise).
The agenda:
- Minutes 0-5. You describe the problem in your own words. We do not pitch anything.
- Minutes 5-15. We walk the four readiness signals out loud. Where one is missing, we say so. Where one is present but unclear, we ask the question that will sharpen it.
- Minutes 15-25. If at least three signals are clearly present and the fourth is reachable, we sketch what a paid engagement would look like — duration, who attends, what artifacts get produced, what the exit condition would be. If fewer than three are present, we tell you what to bring back before a second call would be worth either of our time.
- Minutes 25-30. Questions about how we work, what we charge, who else we have worked with, what we will not do. The page at /standard/what-we-do-not-claim covers most of the "what we will not do" answers in writing.
You will leave that call knowing whether the next step is a proposal, a homework list, or a polite goodbye. All three are real outcomes. We have ended scoping calls with "this is not us, here is who I would call instead" more than once.
Why we put the gate this hard
Themesis covered a related point about career tier matching in her piece on focus for AI workers — the depth of study that is load-bearing for a tradesperson is not the same as for an engineer or an innovator (Class E). The mirror of that for buyers is: the depth of engagement that is load-bearing for a checklist problem is not the same as for a tooling-redesign problem. If we sell you the second when you needed the first, we have wasted your year.
Her Three Strategies for Job Search makes a parallel argument from the candidate side — name the specific superpower, build the weak-tie graph, tell the story that differentiates. The buying-side translation: name the specific problem, bring the specific owner, tell us in your own words the shape of done.
We do not buy story-as-substance and we do not sell it.
What honesty costs us
It costs us deals. We are aware. The compound interest is that the deals we close are the ones that finish well, and that finishing well is what produces the next deal. The receipts page at /transparency lists what we publish about live work as it happens — that is the same posture applied to our own performance, not just to client engagements.
If you have read this far and you can name the problem, the owner, the data, and the exit condition, the link below is the only conversion mechanism on the site.
Next steps
- Book the 30-minute scoping call — free, written notes back within a day.
- Read what we do not claim before you book it.
- See the live intake questions — you can prepare your answers in advance.
- Receipts and live-work transparency — the same standard we apply to ourselves.