What Should You Expect in the First 30 Days Working With Kairos Performance?
The first 30 days follow the same pattern no matter how you start: kickoff within a week, systems access set up in one working session, two to three weeks of learning how your business actually runs, and a short written read on what to fix first. What you have in hand at day 30 depends on what you bought.
- Kickoff happens within five business days of your start date.
- Your systems administrator spends about an hour giving us admin access, so we build inside your systems and you keep control of them.
- The most we plan to ask of any one person on your team is 2 to 4 hours a week.
- You get a 30-minute executive check-in every week and a written update you can read in three minutes.
- We push for a quick win in the first 30 days wherever the scope allows. We don't promise one.
The part most firms leave out: engagements rarely stall because the work is hard. They stall because access, decisions and people's time arrive late. Much of the first 30 days is designed to remove that risk early.
Why isn't there one fixed 30-day timeline?
Because a two-week Discovery Sprint and a three-month retainer shouldn't look the same at day 30. This is roughly where each way in stands.
| How you start | Typical length | What you have around day 30 |
|---|---|---|
| Discovery Sprint | 1 to 2 weeks | Finished: one automation opportunity mapped, ROI estimated, and a priced proposal for what comes next |
| Pilot | 2 to 6 weeks | One automation built and tested, with a go or no-go recommendation, or close to it |
| AI Readiness Assessment or RevOps Assessment | 3 to 5 weeks | Findings and a prioritized roadmap, or close to it. Usually no live automation yet, and that's by design |
| Scoped build | 2 to 10 weeks | Design agreed, build underway, first pieces in testing |
| Retainer (Stabilize, Build or Transform) | 3-month minimum | Priorities ranked, first builds underway, often one small thing already in use |
Full scope and pricing for each is on the pricing page.
What happens in the first two weeks?
Before kickoff. You'll get three short questions: who else should be involved, which tools you already have and which you'd need to buy, and any existing documentation worth reading. That's the only homework.
Kickoff (60 minutes). We confirm who's involved, set the meeting rhythm, reconfirm scope and the definition of done, and agree how changes get handled. A written recap follows within 24 hours.
The systems access session (about an hour). We sit down with your systems administrator and get set up in the tools we'll be working in. We ask for admin access, never owner or billing access. Each of us logs in with a named account, our own credentials and multi-factor authentication. Any new tool is set up in your company's name, on your billing. When the engagement ends, you can remove our access in seconds. This matters more than it sounds: everything we build lives in your systems, under your control, from day one.
Discovery. Over the first two to three weeks we:
- Talk with four to eight people across leadership, sales, marketing, customer success and finance, 30 to 45 minutes each
- Get hands-on with your CRM and data: how fields are used, duplicates, stage definitions, what reporting people actually trust
- Map one or two core processes end to end, usually lead-to-close and the handoffs around it
- Write it up in a short readout around week two or three: what's broken, what to fix first and what we're deliberately leaving alone for now
Who do we need from your side?
We'll ask you to name these at kickoff:
- Executive sponsor. Sets priorities, makes the calls that unblock work, attends the weekly check-in.
- Day-to-day technical lead. Works with us on access, testing and rollout, and becomes the internal owner of what we build.
- Systems administrator. Grants access and sets up integrations.
- An owner for each piece of work. Decides what good looks like and signs off.
- Subject matter experts. Available for interviews and testing when their area is in focus.
One person often covers two or three of these. The RevOps lead, for example, is frequently the technical lead and the systems administrator too. That's normal, and it doesn't slow anything down.
On our side, the people who scope your engagement are the people in your meetings and in your systems. There's no handoff to a junior team after the contract is signed.
How much of your team's time will this take?
We set the meeting rhythm together at kickoff. It usually looks like this:
- A 30-minute executive check-in each week
- One to three one-hour working sessions a week, depending on pace and scope
- A written update each week in the same six-part format: blockers, progress, this week's focus, what we need from you, risks and open questions
- Slack or email for quick decisions in between
The most we plan to ask of any one person on your team is 2 to 4 hours a week. If a specific stretch of work clearly needs more from someone, we'll say so before it happens, not after.
Will we see a quick win in the first 30 days?
Often, but not always. Our position: a quick win is worth chasing only if it sits on the foundation you're building, not in place of it.
Picture how this usually plays out. A services company signs a retainer to build a shared client knowledge system, where meeting notes and performance data turn into proposed updates that an account owner approves. That's a multi-month build. But two weeks of interviews show the account teams rebuilding the same briefs and status reports from scratch every week. So while the larger system is in design, we package a small set of shared AI skills for those recurring documents, and the team starts using them in week three. The quick win came out of discovery, and the bigger build kept moving.
On an Assessment, the first thing you get is usually the written read on what's broken, not a live automation. Forcing an automation onto data that isn't ready just makes a broken process run faster (we've written about why).
What slows the first 30 days down?
| What keeps things moving | What stalls them |
|---|---|
| Access granted in the first week | Access requests sitting for weeks |
| One executive who can make the call | Decisions waiting on a committee |
| Working sessions held as scheduled | Sessions pushed to "next week" repeatedly |
| Existing documentation shared up front | Context we have to go hunting for |
We set timelines conservatively, and we aim to beat them. The biggest variable is pace on your side. Here's the pattern we keep seeing: the companies that get the most out of the first 30 days treat access and decisions as their part of the work, not ours.
If you can't name an executive owner, or can't give us an hour of your systems administrator's time in the first two weeks, wait to start. You'll get more out of the same fee in a month when you can.
What happens at day 30?
It depends on how you started:
- After a Discovery Sprint, you have a priced proposal. The Sprint fee is credited in full toward the next engagement if it starts within 30 days.
- After an Assessment, the roadmap becomes the scope for any build, so there's no second discovery phase. The Assessment earns a $5,000 credit toward a retainer that starts within 30 days.
- On a retainer, you have a ranked roadmap that we review with leadership every month, and the first builds are underway.
Every build ships with an SOP (a written, step-by-step procedure), documentation, training for the people who use it, and a way to tell us what would make it better. Every engagement starts with an agreed scope and definition of done. If a deliverable misses it, we fix it at no additional fee.
Next steps
- Not sure you're ready? Take the five-minute AI Readiness Scorecard and see where you stand across six areas.
- Want to see where you'd start? Compare the ways in on the pricing page, or read Is Kairos Performance the right fit?
- Ready to talk it through? Book a 30-minute Intro Call. You'll leave with an outline of the fix, whether or not you work with us.
The moment is now. Let's build your edge.