Most consultancy and agency websites have a button at the top that says "book a free discovery call." Stan Consulting does not.
This is a frequent question on intake. People are not used to a service business that refuses to spend thirty minutes proving the relationship is worth starting. The free call is the standard format; declining it reads as either bureaucratic or, worse, hostile.
It is neither. The free discovery call is, on inspection, the most expensive part of most consulting engagements that ever happen, and the cause of most consulting engagements that should not have happened.
The buyer pays for the call in time and attention, both of which are scarcer than the dollars the call would have cost. The seller pays for the call in unbilled hours, which they recover by either pricing the eventual engagement higher or by selling more aggressively during the call than is comfortable for either party. Both sides know this even when neither says it.
The deeper problem is what the format optimizes for. A free call rewards the seller who can perform certainty inside thirty minutes. The buyer leaves with a confident summary of what is wrong with their account and what would need to be done about it. The summary is necessarily generic, because nobody can diagnose a Shopify Performance Max account from the audio of a Zoom call. But the confidence is real, and the confidence is what closes the engagement.
The result is a consulting market full of engagements that began with a thirty-minute pitch and ran for eighteen months on the strength of that initial confidence, with neither side noticing for the first six that the diagnosis was a guess.
The diagnosis is the work. Charging for it is not a pricing decision. It is a structural one.
The Conversion Second Opinion is $999 because the diagnosis takes seventy-two hours, costs us roughly that, and produces a written deliverable a buyer can act on regardless of whether they ever hire us for anything else. About a third of CSO engagements end at the diagnostic. The buyer reads the report, hands it to their existing team or agency, and implements the fixes themselves. We do not see them again. The engagement was complete.
That outcome is not a failure of the funnel. It is the funnel working correctly. We sold the work that was needed. The buyer bought it. Both sides got the thing. Nobody was upsold into a retainer they did not need on the strength of a Tuesday afternoon Zoom call.
The reverse outcome is also worth naming. About two thirds of CSO engagements cascade into something larger: a Revenue Sprint, a Consulting tier, a Marketing System Build. In every one of those cases, the cascade happens because the diagnostic surfaced a structural problem that warrants a structural fix. The conversation about the larger engagement happens with both sides looking at the same written document, not at a slide deck the seller built and the buyer trusted.
The free call has its place in service businesses where the work is interchangeable, the buyers are price-sensitive, and the calls are part of a high-volume sales motion. None of that describes the practice. Charging for the diagnostic filters out the buyer for whom this would be wrong, and pre-qualifies the buyer for whom it is right.
If you have made it this far in the dispatch and the question is "but how do I know if you're the right people without talking to you first," the answer is: read the practice page, read the diagnostic format, and read the research. The site is the long discovery call. It is meant to be enough.