People apologize on discovery calls. Not for anything they have done to me, but for the state of their own business, and the pattern is consistent enough that I have started noticing which apologies come up most.
I know my website is embarrassing. I have not posted in months. I probably should have figured all this out by now. I know this is a mess, sorry.
Almost none of it needs apologizing for, and a few of the things people are most ashamed of turn out to be the least concerning parts of the picture. Meanwhile the things that actually give me pause tend to arrive with no self-consciousness at all, mentioned in passing, because nobody has ever told the person they matter.
So here is the view from the other side of the desk. What I actually notice on a first call, what I genuinely do not, and what I wish more people knew before they booked anything with anyone, me included.
The Website You Are Embarrassed About
This is by far the most common apology and it is almost always misplaced.
An outdated site is a solvable problem with a known solution and a fairly predictable cost. It is also, frequently, not the thing standing between someone and more clients. Plenty of businesses with dated sites are doing perfectly well because their positioning is clear and their referral network is strong, and plenty of businesses with beautiful sites are struggling because nobody reading them can tell who they are for or what to do next.
What I actually look at is whether the site describes a decision or a guess. A plain page that names exactly who it is for tells me the underlying thinking is settled, which is the expensive part and the part nobody can do for you. A gorgeous site describing a business in general terms tells me the thinking is not settled, and no amount of design fixes that. Design makes a page credible enough to read. It cannot supply what the page says.
If your site embarrasses you, that is worth knowing and it is rarely urgent. The version that is urgent is when the site actively misdescribes what you do now, because then it is working against you rather than simply looking dated. An old site that is accurate is a cosmetic problem. A current site that describes a business you stopped running two years ago is a real one.
The Gap Since You Last Posted
Second most common apology, and I understand exactly where it comes from, because the advice environment treats consistency as a moral quality rather than a tactic.
A gap in posting tells me very little. What tells me something is whether there was ever a reason for the posting in the first place. Someone who published weekly for a year with no strategy and then stopped is in roughly the same position as someone who never started, and the second person has more energy left.
What I do notice is a pattern of starts and stops across multiple channels. Three months of Instagram, then a newsletter, then a podcast that made it to episode 4 and stopped. That pattern usually means something upstream is unresolved, because a business with clear positioning tends to pick one thing and stay with it long enough to find out whether it works.
The gap is not the issue. The reason for the gap sometimes is.
There is also a version where the gap is straightforwardly good news. Someone who stopped posting because she got busy delivering client work has a business that is working, and the marketing question is about smoothing out the peaks rather than filling an empty pipeline. That is a considerably better problem than the one she thinks she has.
Insider Tip from Andrea
Nobody has ever lost my respect for not having posted in six months. What I pay attention to is whether the person can tell me why she was posting at all. If the answer is that everyone said she should, we have found something more useful to talk about than her content calendar.
Not Knowing Your Numbers
People apologize for this and they should not, mostly because the version of not knowing that matters is different from what they think.
Not having a dashboard is fine. Not knowing your conversion rate to two decimal places is fine. Most businesses this size do not need either one, and building them would be a distraction from work that matters considerably more.
What I hope someone can tell me is roughly where her clients come from and roughly what a client is worth. Not precisely. Roughly. If someone says most of my work comes from two referral partners and a client is usually worth about 8 thousand over a year, that is more than enough to reason with, and it takes no software at all to know.
The version that gives me pause is when someone genuinely cannot say where her last five clients came from. Not because the number matters, but because it usually means marketing has been happening as a set of disconnected activities rather than as something with a direction. If you do not know which channel produced your clients, you cannot know which one to protect when your time gets short.
Charging Less Than You Should
This one rarely arrives as an apology. It arrives as an aside, usually delivered casually, and it is frequently the most important thing said on the call.
I notice when someone describes work that clearly took 40 hours and mentions a fee that would have made sense for 10. I notice when a business is completely full and the revenue does not reflect that at all. I notice when someone mentions she has not raised her prices in three years in the same tone she would use to mention the weather.
Underpricing is not a marketing problem and it will not be solved by more leads. A business that is full and underpaid does not need visibility, it needs a different price, and adding marketing on top of that arrangement usually makes things worse rather than better, since more clients at the wrong rate means more work for the same result and less capacity to fix anything.
Nobody apologizes for this. Plenty of people should mention it earlier than they do, because it changes what the whole conversation should be about.
The reason it goes unmentioned, I think, is that pricing feels like a separate department from marketing. It is not. What you charge determines how many clients you need, which determines how much visibility you need, which determines nearly everything else. A price change can eliminate a marketing problem entirely.
Did You Know?
Andrea’s take: The most common thing I find in a first conversation is not a missing tactic. It is that the person is doing four kinds of work for four kinds of client and has never chosen. Everything downstream, the scattered content, the site that will not come together, the inconsistent leads, follows from that one unresolved thing.
What Actually Gives Me Pause
The things I note without saying anything are almost never the things people bring up.
When someone cannot describe her ideal client except by industry. This usually means the positioning work has not been done, and everything we might build together will be harder and less effective until it is. Industry is a category. What I am listening for is a situation, which is a different thing entirely.
When the answer to what makes you different is something a competitor could also say. Not a dealbreaker, and it means the first project is probably not the one she came to discuss.
When there is no path from interested to hired that does not involve a call. It tells me a great deal of interest has been arriving and leaving with nothing, sometimes for years, and that the fix is small and the loss has been large. This is the one I most often find myself pointing at, and it is almost never what the person came to discuss.
When someone has tried six things in two years. Not because trying is bad, but because it usually means something upstream keeps producing disappointing results, and swapping tactics has been a way of avoiding the harder question. Six channels abandoned around month 4 is usually one problem described six different ways.
When someone wants me to start with the thing that is furthest downstream. Ads, automation, a full rebuild. Sometimes that is genuinely right and the foundation underneath is perfectly sound. Frequently it means the visible symptom is getting treated while the cause sits untouched, and the money spent downstream will need spending again after the upstream work happens anyway.
What a Good First Conversation Looks Like
From my side, the useful ones share a few qualities, and none of them require preparation beyond honesty.
The person describes what has not worked without softening it. This is the single most helpful thing anyone can do on a first call, because I cannot diagnose around a gap someone is protecting, and the instinct to present the business at its best is exactly what removes the useful information.
She has a specific question rather than a general one. Why do people read my work and never contact me is answerable in one sitting. What should I be doing is not, at least not usefully, in 45 minutes, because the honest answer depends on a dozen things we would have to establish first.
She is willing to hear that the answer is not what she asked about. Someone who arrives wanting a website and leaves understanding that her positioning is the actual constraint has had a genuinely valuable call, even though nothing she planned for happened and she is leaving with a different project than the one she came in with.
And she says what she actually wants. A plan to execute herself, someone to take it over, or a second opinion on a decision she has already mostly made. All three are legitimate and they lead to completely different conversations, and guessing which one someone is in wastes the first 15 minutes.
The Thing Nobody Says Out Loud
Most people running a business alone are carrying a low-grade sense that everyone else has figured out something they have not.
They have not. The businesses that look organized from the outside are frequently held together with the same improvisation as everyone else, and the ones that genuinely are organized got there by narrowing rather than by working harder. The polished website belongs to someone who also lies awake wondering whether next quarter will be fine.
Whatever you are apologizing for is probably not the thing worth apologizing for. And whatever is actually holding you back is probably something nobody has ever pointed at, because it is structural rather than visible, and structural problems do not announce themselves the way an outdated homepage does.
Where to Start
If you are considering a conversation with anyone, spend 20 minutes first writing down three things: roughly where your clients have come from, roughly what one is worth, and the one question you actually want answered.
That is more preparation than most people bring, and it changes the quality of the call entirely. It also does something useful even if you never book anything, since writing those three things down tends to reveal which one you cannot answer, and that is usually where the work is.
If you want to narrow the question further before talking to anyone, the Stage Assessment takes about 5 minutes and it is free. It will tell you which stage your business is actually in, which usually reframes what you thought you needed.
And when you are ready to talk, book a free strategy session. Bring the messy version. It is more useful than the polished one and you will get a better answer for it.
