Your onboarding call should not start with a form
If the first ten minutes of a client call are spent collecting basics, you're paying for admin with billable time.
I've sat in on a lot of first client calls. The pattern is consistent: five minutes of small talk, then ten minutes of 'can you send me your goals, your schedule, your history' — questions that should have been answered before the call was booked.
That's not a client problem. It's a systems problem. When intake lives in an email thread, it gets buried, delayed, and half-completed. When it lives in a form that fires automatically at purchase, it gets done before the calendar invite is accepted.
The fix is boring and it works. One form, sent the moment payment clears. Three to five questions, no more. A confirmation screen that tells the client exactly what happens next and when. Coaches who make this switch consistently report gaining back an hour per new client — and that hour goes straight into the work.
The bigger point: onboarding isn't paperwork. It's the first proof of how you operate. A clean intake tells a client you're organized before you've said a word.