The onboarding call nobody needs
Most coaches hold a welcome call out of habit. Here's how to tell whether yours earns its slot.
Count your last ten onboarding calls. How many existed to collect information you could have gathered in a form? If the answer is more than two, you're spending billable hours on data entry with a calendar link.
A useful welcome call does one of three things: it sets expectations the client can't infer from a document, it surfaces a risk you need to plan around, or it creates the trust that makes hard feedback land later. If your call does none of those, replace it with a short intake form and a recorded walkthrough of the dashboard. Clients rarely object to getting their time back.
When we audited our own coaching offers, the pattern was consistent: calls that opened with 'tell me about yourself' ran long and produced nothing actionable. Calls that opened with 'here's what the next six weeks look like, what's your biggest concern about that' ran short and produced decisions.
Try this for one cohort. Send the intake form forty-eight hours ahead, keep the call to thirty minutes, and put the agenda in the calendar invite. If nobody complains and your prep time drops, you've found your new default.