Block four hours for the first meeting; learn the company.
technique — attributed to Joanna Stone Herman
Stone Herman's firm blocks at least four hours for the first client meeting. The team goes through a product demo and learns about the technology. They are already experts on the industry; they need to become experts on the specific company. They review everything in detail, with good food on the table, working hard in a room together. The discipline is operationally specific. Four hours feels excessive against typical advisor first meetings. The investment is what produces the depth that follows. By the end of the meeting, the bankers are saying we when they talk about the company. That linguistic shift is the marker of the relationship that the rest of the engagement runs on.
For M&A advisors, investment bankers, and any service-firm professional running first client meetings on complex engagements. The technique is most useful as a corrective when first meetings have defaulted to one-hour calendar blocks.
first-meeting, deep-dive, client-discovery, demo