The first 72 hours of a consulting engagement set the shape of everything that follows. Not the first month. Not the first week. The first three days. If you spend them doing preliminary research and scheduling a second call, you have already signaled that you operate on a slow cadence. If you spend them delivering something real, you have set a different expectation entirely.
The sequence I use works across clients at very different scales. It worked for Samako, a Netherlands-based operation I onboarded from three transcripts. It worked for Realsy, a CPG brand preparing for Kroger expansion. It held for Our Place, a $200M business with seven global warehouses and a supply chain crisis already in motion before I joined. The framework does not change much. The complexity scales, but the moves are the same.
The discovery call
The first call has one job: understand the operation as it actually exists, not as the client describes it.
Clients describe the ideal-state version of their supply chain. “We have inventory in two warehouses and we restock weekly.” In practice they have inventory in two warehouses plus a container on the water plus some stock at a prep center they forgot to mention, and the weekly restock is more of a “when we remember to check.” Every discovery call I have run has uncovered more complexity than the client’s initial description suggested.
The questions that surface the real picture: How many SKUs are active? How many channels? Where is inventory physically located right now? When did you last run out of stock on your best seller? What tools are you using to track POs? Have you had a supplier hold inventory due to a payment dispute?
That last question is diagnostic. If the answer is yes, you have immediate visibility into a financial operations problem that was never in the brief.
By the end of the discovery call, the goal is a shared list of what the client has, what they are missing, and what is most at risk. The supply chain complexity audit happens in this call, not in a separate session.
The master positioning sheet
This is the first deliverable, and it goes out before the first review call. Not after. Before.
The sheet shows: every active SKU, on-hand inventory by location, open purchase orders with expected arrival dates, projected demand for the next 60 to 90 days, and days of supply per SKU. For Realsy, this covered three snack pack variants with Kroger retailer forecasts layered in. For Our Place, it meant mapping inventory across seven warehouses against an FBA depletion curve that had a hard deadline when the tariff made replenishment impossible.
Most clients have never seen their own data organized this way. They know they have inventory. They do not know exactly how much, or where, or how long it will last. Showing them that view in the first session is the fastest way to establish credibility. Not because it is impressive. Because it is useful. Immediately useful, today, for decisions they need to make this week.
The sheet also surfaces the first priority list. When you can see days of supply across all SKUs, the items closest to zero are visible instantly. The first priority list comes from that sheet, not from the client telling you what they think is most important.
The first priority list
By hour 72, there should be a shared list of the three to five things most at risk or most actionable in the next 14 days. Not a comprehensive account audit. Not a full operations review. Three to five things with named owners and specific timelines.
For Our Place, the first priority was clear before the discovery call even finished: 170% tariff on Chinese-origin appliances, inventory projected to run out by late August, and a Thailand production pivot that needed to start immediately. The priority list wrote itself from the supply chain complexity audit.
For Realsy, the priorities were different: inventory positioning for Kroger onboarding, snack pack variant tracking, and a PO process that was running through Trello in a way that was becoming unmanageable as volume grew. All of that was visible within the first session.
What “onboarded” means
The client is onboarded when two things are true. They know you understand their operation, specifically enough to identify what is at risk. And both parties have a shared, written view of what the client has and when they will run out.
The second condition is the practical one. “When they will run out” is not a figure of speech. It is a date, by SKU, on the positioning sheet. An operation where everyone knows the inventory position is one where restocking decisions can be made with lead time rather than in crisis mode. An operation where nobody knows the inventory position is one where stockouts are surprises.
The gap between a three-transcript Samako engagement and a $200M Our Place deal is mostly the volume of complexity, not the structure of the onboarding. More SKUs, more warehouses, more suppliers, more risk factors. The sequence is the same: discover the real operation, build the positioning sheet, identify the first priorities, and hand the client a shared view of their situation before the end of day three.
Everything that follows is built on that foundation.
