Scheduling for consultants with no assistant to screen calls
A firm has somebody between the enquiry and the partner. A solo consultant is the enquiry form, the screen, the call and the delivery, and the only one of those that scales is the form.
That makes the booking page the highest-leverage surface in the practice. It is the one place where a decision can be made without your attention, and most consultants leave it making no decision at all.
The result is a calendar with a $2,000 project on it, discovered forty minutes in, on an afternoon that was supposed to be delivery.
What the form asks
- Engagement budget
- $10,000 to $25,000
- What do you need help with?
- Series A readiness
- When do you want to start?
- Within 30 days
The rule that runs first
engagement_budget in [under_10k] → block
How the score is weighted
- Budget fit×3.0
- Scope clarity×2.0
- Start date×2.0
One person, no assistant, no room to discover a $2,000 project forty minutes into a call.
Worth doing the sum
What an under-scoped call costs a solo practice
Every input is on the page so you can put your own numbers in. Nothing here is a study, an average, or a claim about anybody's results.
- Call
- 45 minutes
- Prep and follow-up
- 30 minutes
- Effective rate
- $250 per hour
- Calls like this per month
- 3
Seventy-five minutes at $250 is about $310, three times a month, or roughly $11,000 a year of your own time spent on engagements you were always going to decline.
The billable-hour framing understates it for most consultants. The real cost is that those hours come out of delivery, and delivery is what generates the referral that fills next quarter.
About twenty minutes
Setting it up, in order.
- 1
Three questions: budget as a band, what they actually need, and when they want to start. Not more, because you are the only person answering the follow-ups.
- 2
Block below your engagement floor with a message you wrote. Most consultants point to a paid strategy session or a resource, so the answer is useful rather than just no.
- 3
One host, which is the Free plan: it collects the answers and scores them with the built-in profile. Steps four and five need Pro, which is also where the gate itself lives.
- 4
Weight budget heaviest, then scope clarity, then start date. Writing your own weighting is a Pro feature; on Free every booking is still scored, using the built-in profile. Either way the reasoning that comes back is written, so you can read why rather than trusting a number.
- 5
Put the booking flow on your own site with the embed, so the enquiry never leaves your domain and inherits your typeface and colours rather than announcing which tool you use. The embed is Pro as well.
Read next
Qualify leads before they book, not after
Screening questions that run after the slot is taken cost you the meeting anyway. Here is how to put qualification in front of the calendar instead.
Questions
What consultants ask first.
Is this overkill for one person?
The Free plan is one host with the intake form and a scored booking, which is worth having on its own. Three things need Pro: the gate that stops a booking before the calendar renders, a scoring profile you write yourself, and the embed. Whether that is worth $19 depends on how many wrong calls you took last month.
Can I still take calls that fail the rule?
Yes. A rule can flag rather than block: the booking goes through, the score takes a penalty and the booking is marked, so you decide with the information rather than being decided for.
Will the booking page look like my site?
The embed mounts into your own page and reads its computed font, text colour, border colour and radius, so it inherits rather than approximating. It is not an iframe, which is what makes that possible.
Same machinery
Different inputs, same product.
Setupp does not ship an opinion about what a good booking looks like. It ships the gate, the score and the invite, and you set the floor.
Stop taking calls you would have declined.
Connect a calendar, write the five questions you already ask on every call, and set the floor you already have in your head. About twenty minutes. Then never spend another Tuesday afternoon finding out about a mismatch.
One host free, forever. No card, no sales call to get a trial.
- 01Multi-recipient invitesfrom Pro
- 02Qualification before the calendarfrom Pro
- 03A score on every booking
- 04An embed that inherits your brandfrom Pro