Two consultants and two different answers on whether the first call costs money

The case for charging is a boring one, and the arithmetic makes it. Say a consultant runs free 60 minute calls for a year and tracks them, and 31 calls turn into 4 paid scopes. That is 31 hours plus prep and follow up for four jobs. Introduce a $200 fee and inquiries typically fall by about half, while the close rate on the calls that remain moves to roughly one in three. Same revenue, with far less of the week gone.

There is a case for the opposite of what @mikeoconnell7 lays out. Free, 25 minutes, hard stop on the clock. The cap is what does the work there, more than the price. When there is no money on the table, people say what they actually want in the first four minutes because there is no ceremony.

It depends who is on the call. If it is an owner with a specific problem and a date attached, the call is free, because the call is the sales meeting. If it is someone who opens with "I'd love to pick your brain," that is a paid session or nothing. Firms that do not draw that line lose hours to the second kind, and it is usually the principal who let it happen.

Worth thinking about what the free call obligates the consultant to. Specific recommendations on a specific deal in an unpaid call amount to advice with no scope and no liability cap, and often nothing in writing about what was and was not reviewed. A consultant is better off charging $150 with an engagement letter than giving an hour away with none. Whether that exposure actually bites depends on the state and on what was said, and that is a question for an attorney who has read the paperwork.

The point @dmitri_248 raises is the one that matters. Pull three consulting engagement letters and two of them will date the engagement from the signature, which means everything said in the free discovery call sits outside the scope and outside the cap on liability. That is fine right up until the client remembers the free call as the moment the consultant told them the site worked.

I'm the one who'd be buying this, not selling anything. I would not pay $250 to talk to someone I've never heard speak. I'd pay $250 to talk to someone whose written work I'd already read for free. So maybe the answer isn't the call, it's what exists before the call.

@bmoreno23 basically nailed it. If your name means nothing yet, the free hour is your marketing budget.

Lenders do a version of this. Nobody charges you to talk about a possible loan; they charge you at application, when your file starts costing them real money. The free conversation is priced into the deals that close. A consultant with a high close rate can afford to give the call away, and one with a low close rate can't.

Run the numbers before arguing about the principle. Say a consultant wants $180k of revenue a year and the average scope is $6k. That is 30 jobs. At a 1 in 8 close rate on free calls that is 240 calls a year, which is a full day a week of unpaid selling plus the follow up emails. At 1 in 3 it is 90 calls and the free model works fine. The break point is the close rate rather than the $250, and most people who quote either policy with confidence have never counted their own.

@dpatel_re that math is the only useful thing in the thread, but it is missing the credit back mechanic @ehernandez74 described. If the $250 gets credited against the engagement, the paid call is really a deposit that tests intent. Revenue is unchanged either way and the consultant has bought herself a filter. That is a different question from whether advice should be billed.

I've been reading for six months without closing anything, which makes me the exact person a paid call filters out. I'd probably have paid the $250 anyway and gotten very little from it, because I don't know enough yet to ask a question worth $250. Not sure that's an argument for either side but it made me think about who the filter catches.

In construction nobody pays for the walkthrough and everybody pays for the estimate. The site visit is free, the number is not. Consulting has the same shape. Talk for free, write nothing for free.

"Write nothing for free" is the line I'd steal. The two people I've talked to about land holding patterns both gave me time happily and both went silent when I asked for anything on paper.

So the real split in here is whether the call is selling or delivering, more than whether it is paid or free. If it is selling, charging for it is strange. If the consultant starts delivering opinions on the call, the selling has stopped and the work should be paid. @ehernandez74 your free consultant probably rambled because she was still selling. The paid one was delivering.

On the capital raising side, operators spend an enormous amount of unpaid time on first conversations and consider it the job. Nobody bills a first meeting. It is a different business, but it is a reason to be suspicious of the idea that a filter is always a good thing. Some of the best clients start out looking unserious.

I voted for the hard cap. I did four unpaid calls last quarter that ran past 90 minutes because I like talking about deals, and one of them turned into work. The cap isn't about the client at all, it's about me. @monica_tran3's 25 minutes with a real stop is the version I'm copying.