00:04Juarez (You)
Thanks for making time, Amara. I'm trying to understand how independent consultants and small agency owners manage the conversations that shape client work — from the first discovery call through delivery and renewal. So today I just want the messy version of how that works for you, not the tidy one.
00:26Amara Smith
Happy to. Honestly, the messy version is the only version I have.
00:33Juarez (You)
Can you walk me through the last discovery call you ran, from booking it to sending the proposal?
00:41Amara Smith
It was a rebrand for a dental group. It came through a referral, I skimmed their website for ten minutes, and I went in with a Google Doc of questions I've reused for about three years. During the call I type into the same doc, but I'm half listening and half typing, so what I end up with is mostly fragments.
01:24Juarez (You)
What do you write down during a call, and when do you look at it again?
01:33Amara Smith
Fragments, like I said. I reread them when I write the proposal, which is usually two or three days later, and by then half of them don't make sense. Last month I lost a whole requirement that way. They told me their board signs off on anything over fifteen thousand, and it never made it into my notes.
02:10Juarez (You)
Got it. And how many of these calls do you run in a typical week?
02:17Amara Smith
Three or four, on top of delivery work. I bill about a hundred and forty an hour, so every hour I spend rewriting notes is an hour I'm not billing.
02:41Juarez (You)
Makes sense. What does the proposal itself look like — is it a template?
02:50Amara Smith
A Keynote template. I duplicate the last one and rewrite it, which is how a dental client once got a paragraph about a coffee roaster.
03:05Juarez (You)
Ouch. Have you tried anything to fix the note-taking side of this?
03:12Amara Smith
I've got three note-taking apps on my phone right now. I tried an AI notetaker for a couple of months, but clients got weird about a bot joining the call. And it gave me a summary of everything, which is the same as a summary of nothing.