3
Discovery: The First 30 Days
The interview sequence, data review order, and pillar scoring that sets up every downstream decision.
22 minCore6 sections
The 30-day discovery arc
The goal of the first 30 days is a defensible scorecard across 6 pillars (Finance, Operations, Technology, Client Services, Sales, Compliance), a prioritized opportunity list, and a Year-1 plan the CEO and partner both sign.
01
Week 1 — CEO, COO, CFO interviews. Data room review. Thesis deep-read.
02
Week 2 — Function heads. Frontline shadowing. Tech stack scan. Transcript review of past sales/client calls.
03
Week 3 — Pillar scoring. Opportunity long-list. Benchmarks comparison.
04
Week 4 — Prioritize, pressure-test with CEO, present to partner, get sign-off.
The Experience Bridge
Map this concept back to what you already know
In your past role
In any role where you had to scope a project before running it, you learned to do stakeholder interviews before designing the work itself. You pressure-tested hypotheses, scoped the approach, and only then launched.
At Red Iron Group
Week 1 interviews = stakeholder interviews. The questions are 80% the same: "What keeps you up at night?" "Where are you losing?" "If I fixed one thing what would it be?" "Who's the person I should really be talking to?"
Why the skill transfers
You already know how to turn a vague ask into a scoped plan. The output was once a questionnaire, a brief, or a roadmap. Here the output is a pillar scorecard + opportunity list. Same muscle.
Tip
The question that unlocks every interview
"If I gave you a magic wand and you could fix one operational thing by next quarter, what would it be — and why hasn't it been done already?" The second half is where the real answer lives.
Scenario
Scenario practice
Setup
Day 3 of Charter Impact. You're in a 1:1 with COO James Park. You ask your magic-wand question. He says: "Fix how we onboard new clients. It takes 6 weeks, the handoff from sales to CS is chaos, and we've lost two deals in the last 3 months because of it."
What's your immediate next move in the conversation?
Checklist
Week 1 checklist
Try it now in the platform
This is the module you'll actually run week-1 discovery in. Open it, find the Intelligence tab, and see how transcripts feed the scoreboard.
Open Charter Impact Discovery
Academy — ValueDriverOS Training System