Time with your founder or key operator, primarily. We extract the judgment from conversations and real decisions, not just from documents. We also need access to representative work: past client decisions, delivery records, quality standards. Most principals invest 8 to 12 hours in the foundation phase.
You’ll primarily need to invest your time, plus access to representative work and systems.
Time commitment
We’ll need 8–12 hours from you (and whoever holds the deepest institutional knowledge—usually the founder) over the first 8 weeks. That time is spread across:
- A 90-minute bootstrap intake session
- Several short working sessions to review and calibrate the first domain outputs
- A feedback loop in weeks 4–8 where you review system outputs and flag anything that’s off
What we need access to
To accurately capture how your business thinks and operates, we’ll ask for:
- Representative past work and client decisions
- Key communications (emails, memos, decks, etc.) that show how you reason and make calls
- Any existing methodology or process documentation, even if it’s informal or messy
- Credentials for the integrations we agree to connect at the start (e.g., tools, data sources)
Prep required from you
The intake session is intentionally low-prep. You don’t need to organize documents or create anything beforehand. The session is structured as a guided conversation that pulls out what you know verbally; the heavy lifting of structuring, organizing, and systematizing happens on our side afterward.
Related: How long setup takes · What CRMs Vantage works with · The Voice Corpus