Ask any supplier five questions before you sign, and judge them by how plainly they answer. The questions are below, with what a good answer sounds like and what should make you walk away.
Many owners have been pitched something like this before, and at least one of those pitches cost them. Good. That is the right amount of scepticism to bring to the first call.
1. Will you prove the value before I commit?
A good answer is a number, in your terms. Hours back each week, jobs you are losing today, money you are leaving on the table, worked out from your business before you pay for anything.
A poor answer is a demo. A demo shows you their product at its best. It tells you nothing about your business.
2. Who builds it, and can I meet them?
A good answer is a name, and the name is on the call with you. The person who hears how your business works should be the person who builds the system, because a handover between a salesperson and a builder loses a detail that mattered.
Walk away if the builder is a team you will never meet.
3. What do I keep if we part ways?
A good answer is short, and in writing. Your customer records are yours, and you can export them at any time, not only on the way out. You also know, before you start, what happens to the service on the day you stop paying for it.
A vague answer is the warning sign. An ending is easy to agree at the start, and hard to sort out at the finish.
4. What happens when it breaks?
Everything breaks eventually. The question is whether anyone notices.
We learned this on our own system. Our content engine ran dead for twelve days in July and August 2026 on an expired login, and every check we had said it was fine. The checks were watching whether the machine was running. Nothing was watching whether the work came out the other end.
So ask a supplier two things. What do you watch? And what would you notice, and how fast, if the work stopped while the machine kept running? A good answer names the thing that is checked, who gets told, and who fixes it.
5. What number will we count before and after?
A good answer names one number and measures it before anything is built: replies sent within the hour, quotes followed up, hours spent retyping. The same number gets counted afterwards, the same way.
Vague words are the warning sign. Efficiency, productivity and time savings sound like results. With no starting number behind them, nobody can ever prove them wrong, and nobody can prove them right either.
What goes wrong?
At the demo. A polished demo makes the other four questions feel rude. Ask them anyway, and ask for the answers in writing.
And sometimes the right answer is to hire nobody. If one tool off the shelf does the job, buy the tool. When to buy and when to build covers how to make that call.
One step for this week
Send these five questions, in writing, to every supplier you are talking to. Put the answers side by side. The plainest set of answers usually belongs to the supplier who has done the work before.
These are the questions we answer on the first call. See how we work.
