The Discovery Call I Forgot to Count

Every freelancer has a policy about discovery calls. Some charge for them. Most do not. I was in the do-not camp for a long time because it felt like the right move. You do not charge someone just to talk about working together. That is what I told myself.

What I was actually doing was running a part-time unpaid consulting service disguised as sales.

How It Starts Innocent

The first call is 30 minutes. You ask about the project, they describe what they need, you get a feel for whether it is a fit. That part is fine. That part is just sales.

But somewhere in year two or three of freelancing, the discovery call stops being 30 minutes. It becomes an hour. Then it becomes an hour plus a follow-up email where you answer three specific questions. Then it becomes that, plus a brief you wrote to show you understood their problem.

And none of it is billed. None of it is even tracked. It just disappears into the week like it did not happen.

The Week I Started Logging It

I started using Time-Trak for all client work and made a specific category for pre-project time. Calls, proposals, briefs, back-and-forth before a contract was signed.

I also started logging discovery calls.

In the first full week I tracked this, I had three discovery calls. One was 35 minutes. One was an hour and 10. One was 45 minutes and then produced a 90-minute follow-up session where I basically audited their existing setup for free because they kept asking questions and I kept answering.

Total pre-project time that week: 4.5 hours.

Billable hours that week: zero from any of those three prospects. None of them converted.

The Annual Number

I went back and estimated, conservatively, how many discovery calls I had taken in the previous 12 months. I kept a rough log in my calendar so I could count the meetings.

About 60 calls across the year. Average length, once you count the follow-up emails and the freebies I threw in to demonstrate value, was probably 45 minutes to an hour each.

That is 45 to 60 hours. At my rate at the time, that was between $4,500 and $6,000 in time I had given away in the name of not wanting to seem like I charged to talk to people.

Some of those calls converted into real projects. Maybe 20 of them. The other 40 were just gone.

What I Changed

I did not start charging for every discovery call. That felt like overcorrecting.

What I did instead was get tighter about what a discovery call was allowed to be. Thirty minutes. Here is what we cover, here is what we do not. If the conversation moved into strategy, auditing, or specific recommendations, I started naming that as consulting and letting the prospect know it was billable.

For prospects who pushed back, I noted that in my log. Clients who argue about paying for 30 minutes of advice before a contract is signed will argue about your invoice after one too.

I also started sending a short intake form before any call. It filtered out a lot of tire-kickers and meant the calls that did happen were shorter because the groundwork was done.

The Shift in How I Think About It

Tracking that pre-project time changed how I saw my conversion rate. Before, I thought my conversions were fine because I could not see the cost of the failed ones.

Once I could see that each non-converting discovery call cost me about an hour of work, I started being more selective. I asked more questions before agreeing to a call. I took fewer calls. And my conversion rate on the ones I did take went up because I was talking to better-fit prospects.

The time was always being spent. I just was not seeing it. Once I started logging it, everything got sharper.

Track your time, bill every minute.

Time-Trak is a native Mac and Windows time tracker with a floating timer, automatic screenshots, and one-click invoicing.

Free during beta.

macOS + Windows · Floating widget · Auto screenshots