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

I charge for it now and the reason is boring. I ran free 60 minute calls for a year, tracked them, and 31 calls turned into 4 paid scopes. That's 31 hours plus prep and follow up for four jobs. Charging $200 dropped inquiries by maybe half and the close rate on the calls that remained went to about one in three. Same revenue, way less of my week gone.

Five years in and I do it the opposite way from @lantern. Free, 25 minutes, hard stop on the clock. The cap is doing all the work, not the price. When there's no money on the table people say what they actually want in the first four minutes because there's no ceremony.

Depends who's on the call. If it's an owner with a specific problem and a date attached, free, because the call is the sales meeting. If it's someone who says "I'd love to pick your brain," that's a paid session or nothing. My team wastes hours on the second kind and I'm the one who let it happen.

Worth thinking about what the free call obligates you to. If you're giving specific recommendations on a specific deal in an unpaid call, you've given advice without a scope, without a limitation of liability, and often without anything in writing about what you did and didn't look at. I'd rather charge $150 and have an engagement letter than give an hour away with none. Whether that exposure actually bites depends on your state and on what you said, and that's a question for an attorney who's read your paperwork.

@warrant is on the thing I care about. I've read three consulting engagement letters this year and two of them dated 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's fine right up until the client remembers the free call as the moment you 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.

@ember 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 you argue about the principle. Say you want $180k of consulting revenue and your average scope is $6k. That's 30 jobs. At a 1 in 8 close rate on free calls you're taking 240 calls a year, which is a full day a week of unpaid selling plus the follow up emails. At 1 in 3 it's 90 calls and the whole thing works. The break point isn't the $250, it's your close rate, and most people quoting either policy here have never counted.

@sextant that math is the only useful thing in the thread but I think it's missing the credit-back mechanic @anchor described. If the $250 gets credited against the engagement, the paid call isn't revenue, it's a deposit that tests intent. Revenue is unchanged either way and you've just bought yourself a filter. That's 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. Feels like 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 split in here isn't really paid versus free, it's whether the call is selling or delivering. If it's selling, charging for it is strange. If you start delivering opinions on the call you've stopped selling and you should be paid. @anchor your free consultant probably rambled because she was still selling. The paid one was delivering.

On the capital side the people I've watched raise money spend an enormous amount of unpaid time on first conversations and consider it the job. Nobody bills a first meeting. Different business, but it made me 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. @thatch's 25 minutes with a real stop is the version I'm copying.