The First Conversation: Discovery & Setting Expectations

The First Conversation: Discovery & Setting Expectations

The first conversation with a client (or with your leadership if you are in-house) sets the trajectory for the entire engagement. Get it right, and you build a foundation of clarity that carries you through months of work. Get it wrong, and you spend those months untangling misaligned expectations.

This lesson covers what to ask, what to listen for, how to spot red flags early, and the one thing you must push back on from day one.

Two Kinds of Clients Walk Through the Door

Every ESG reporting engagement starts from one of two positions, and you need to know which one you are dealing with immediately.

The Fresh Starter This company has never published a sustainability or ESG report. They may have seen competitors do it, heard about it at a conference, or received a nudge from investors. They come to you saying "we want this", but they do not really know what "this" is. They have no existing structure, no data templates, no established process.

With fresh starters, your job is bigger than writing a report. You are building the entire process from scratch: selecting standards, designing templates, educating departments on what data to collect, and managing expectations about how long this will actually take.

The "Mature" Company This company has one or two previous ESG reports. They come to you saying "we want to build on what we have" or "we want to innovate." The word "innovate" comes up a lot, but they rarely know what they mean by it. They want some newness, something that feels different from last year, but they cannot articulate what that looks like.

With mature companies, the advantage is that data collection processes exist (even if they are imperfect) and the organization has some familiarity with what goes into a report. The challenge is that they often want things to feel new without understanding what is actually possible or desirable.

What to Ask in the Discovery Call

Your first meeting is a discovery session. You are not there to present a proposal or show off your knowledge of GRI standards. You are there to listen and ask questions that the client may not have considered.

The essential questions:

1. Why now? What triggered the decision to do an ESG report this year? Was it a board directive, investor pressure, a regulatory deadline, peer activity? The answer tells you the real motivation.

2. Who asked for it? Is this coming from the CEO, the board, the sustainability team, or an external stakeholder? The answer tells you where the power sits and who needs to be satisfied.

3. Who is the audience? Who will actually read this report? Investors? Rating agencies? Regulators? Customers? Employees? "Everyone" is not an acceptable answer: push for specifics.

4. What is the deadline, and why? Is there a hard deadline tied to an AGM, a regulatory filing, or a rating cycle? Or is the deadline aspirational ("we would like it by Q3")? The distinction matters enormously.

5. Have you done this before? If yes, what worked and what did not? What feedback did they receive on previous reports? If no, what peer reports have they seen that they liked?

6. What is your data readiness? Do they have sustainability data organized somewhere, or will everything need to be collected from scratch? This question alone can tell you whether this is a three-month engagement or a six-month one.

What Clients Will Not Tell You Voluntarily

There are two things you almost always have to dig for, because clients will not volunteer them:

The real motivation. A company might say "we want to communicate our sustainability journey to stakeholders." The real story might be that their largest investor sent a formal letter requesting climate risk disclosures, and the board panicked. The stated reason and the actual reason are often different. You need to uncover the actual reason because that is what the report needs to address.

The real deadline. Clients will give you an aspirational deadline: the date they wish the report could be done. The actual deadline is usually later, tied to a specific event. Understanding the difference prevents you from making unrealistic commitments and then being blamed for missing them.

Recognizing Red Flags Early

Not every engagement will be smooth, and certain signals in the first conversation should put you on alert:

"We want it done in four weeks." Any timeline that sounds unrealistically short probably is. ESG reports take 2.5 to 3 months under ideal conditions, and ideal conditions almost never exist. A client who demands an impossibly fast turnaround either does not understand the process or is setting you up to fail.

"Our team already knows exactly what we want." Be cautious when stakeholders assume they understand ESG reporting better than the person they hired to do it. This can lead to constant friction: they will question your recommendations, second-guess your structure, and assume errors where there are none. Confidence is great; overconfidence without expertise creates problems.

"We will get you everything you need quickly." Data collection is the number one reason engagements take longer than planned. When a client assures you that data will come fast, they are almost always underestimating how scattered and incomplete their information is. Plan for delays regardless of what they promise.

Nobody from leadership is in the first meeting. If the kickoff meeting is attended only by junior team members without decision-making authority, the engagement will struggle with slow approvals and unclear direction. Ideally, at least one senior stakeholder should be present at the start.

The One Thing You Must Push Back On: Timelines

If there is a single piece of advice that separates experienced ESG professionals from newcomers, it is this: always push back on the client's proposed timeline.

They will always want it done early. It will always be because of them that it takes long. And if you do not set realistic expectations from day one, they will blame you when the report is late.

Here is what happens in a typical engagement: the client says they want the report in three months. You agree. In month one, you send the data template. The client takes three weeks to even start filling it. In month two, you are chasing departments for data that keeps coming in incomplete. In month three, you have written the report but the client's review process takes four weeks. The report is delivered in month five. And the client says you were late.

If you had set a realistic four-to-five month timeline from the start (explaining that data collection and reviews are the biggest time drivers), the same outcome would be seen as on-track instead of a failure.

Structuring the First Meeting

A good first meeting follows a rough structure:

1. Introductions and context (10 minutes): Who is in the room, what roles they play, and a brief overview of the engagement.
2. Discovery questions (20-30 minutes): Work through the questions listed above. Listen more than you talk.
3. Process overview (15 minutes): Walk the client through the high-level process: peer benchmarking, data collection, writing, reviews, design, delivery. Set the expectation that this is a collaborative process, not a handoff.
4. Timeline discussion (15 minutes): Propose a realistic timeline with milestones. Be specific about what depends on the client (data, reviews, approvals).
5. Next steps (5 minutes): Agree on immediate actions: who sends what by when.

Document everything from this meeting in a follow-up email. This is not bureaucracy: it is your reference point for the entire engagement. When stakeholders later say "that is not what we agreed," you have the email.

The Takeaway

Your first conversation is the most underrated part of the entire engagement. It is easy to treat it as a formality, a quick chat before the "real work" begins. But the clarity you build (or fail to build) in this conversation echoes through every phase that follows. Ask the hard questions, push back on unrealistic timelines, and document everything. The rest of the process becomes dramatically easier when the foundation is solid.