What to Send Before Booking a Discovery Call

You don’t need a finished brief to start a conversation—just an idea of what’s getting in the way.

Clients often arrive at a discovery call with a solution already in mind: “We need Shopify,” “We need a whole new website,” or “We need AI.” Sometimes that turns out to be the exact right direction, but it is often an educated guess made by someone wearing a different hat who's trying to solve a more immediate problem.

At Manny Roy Consulting (MRC), we prefer to start with what is happening right now, what is not working well, and what you're trying to improve.

Here is what you should prepare before we talk.

The 10-Minute Minimum

If you only have ten minutes to prepare for our call or draft an email, just gather these three things:

• The URL: A link to the current site, tool, or system—or a note that there isn’t one yet.
• The frustration: What feels outdated, confusing, or harder than it should be? A short paragraph or a few bullet points is plenty.
• The team: Who currently updates or manages it, what their role is, and whether anyone else is involved.

That is plenty of context for a highly useful first conversation. Everything else in this article is optional. If you have a larger team or several connected systems, there is likely more context available, but you don’t need to hunt it all down before we speak.

Show and Tell: Gathering More Context

A first conversation is always easier when we can see what you already have and understand how people currently use it. If you have the time, here is the extra context that helps the most:

• The current ecosystem: A link is usually more useful than a description. If customers or staff use several places to get something done (a website, Google Business Profile, booking system, online store, or portal), send those too.
• The primary goal: What are you trying to get done? This can be simple: book a table, apply for a program, process an order, or answer a common customer question. The goal is to understand what should be easier than it currently is.
• The roadblocks: Where are things getting stuck? Maybe customers keep calling because they cannot find something. Maybe updating a page takes too long, or maybe two systems refuse to talk to each other.
• The constraints: Budget, timing, seasonality, grant deadlines, internal approvals, staffing limitations, or existing technology can all affect what makes sense. Sharing these early helps narrow the options down to something practical (and reasonable).

What to Skip

You don't need to have everything figured out before reaching out. In fact, please save your time and skip the following:

• Choosing a platform: You do not need to pick a software or platform before we talk. If you have some in mind, we can treat them as possible directions.
• Creating a technical specification: You do not need a finished sitemap or a twenty-page project brief before anyone has even looked at the problem.
• Gathering credentials: You should not bring a folder full of logins or share credentials in a discovery call—or email them—ever.
• Pre-diagnosing the solution: Do not decide that the whole site or system needs to be rebuilt before it has been properly reviewed.

Mood boards, plugin lists, and examples of sites you like can be useful later. For an initial conversation, something as simple as "customers keep asking us the same three questions" or "our competitors' sites look way better" is much more helpful.

How We Handle Pre-Discovery at MRC

When you reach out to Manny Roy Consulting with your initial context, here is what happens next:

1. Direct Response: You will get a direct reply, usually within one or two business days.
2. The Discovery Call: We will talk through how things currently work, what you are trying to improve, and where the biggest problems seem to be before we hop on a call. This ensures we're discussing the problem at hand, or at least finding it more efficiently.
3. The Recommendation: I may recommend a full project, a smaller fix, some further investigation, or simply a few things you can handle internally.

The goal of our first conversation is not to force your problem into a particular project or platform, but to understand the situation well enough to decide what a sensible next step looks like. Sometimes that means another list of requirements, and other times that can lead us directly into a proposal phase.

And if I'm not the right person for the work, I'll tell you directly and point you toward a better resource.

Ready to get started? If you have even the ten-minute version ready, let's start a conversation. If you want to understand how MRC approaches the work first, check out our About page to learn more about our process for discovery, recommendations, implementation, and handoff.