Honoring Instinct

Years ago, in a previous career running sales for IT managed services, a major proposal request would land on my desk – the kind worth several million dollars over three years – and three of us would read it: me, a senior executive from delivery, and the regional VP. We read it separately, and then each wrote a single number on a blank piece of paper. That was our bid: no workload model, no headcount plan, no costing of the externals, because we'd done none of that yet. Just the number, cold, from the gut.

Then we'd turn the pages over, and most of the time the three numbers sat within a few percent of each other. If we agreed the thing was worth chasing, we'd spend two, three, sometimes four weeks building the proper bid – every deliverable scoped, every resource mapped, every external cost priced – and the number we landed on at the end was usually within five percent of the one we'd scrawled before any of it started.

The number was never the work; it was the result of the work, arriving before the work had been done. Instinct couldn't show its working or defend a single line of the figure, and you can't bid several million dollars on a number you can't stand behind. But it wasn't guessing. It was reading something real, fast, out of years of having done this before, and the analysis that followed didn't overturn that read. It gave it a body.

What we were doing on that blank page has a name, at least in the way Kristina and I have come to think about advisory: it's the first of five stages every real decision moves through. I don't name them to hand you a clever system – the opposite. Advisory gets sold as some instinct for strategy you either have or you don't, and what we found, looking at the client relationships that worked, was that there's nothing mystical in it: just a shape that repeats, once someone points at it. We call it the Five I's – Instinct, Insight, Intention, Implementation, and Inspection.

I'll take them one at a time, a newsletter issue each, because the place advisory work fails is rarely inside a stage; it's in the handover from one to the next. Today is only the first, and it's the one almost everyone is quickest to wave away.

Here is what the bid story is really about: a business owner's instinct is almost never the part that's wrong.

The owners we work with all carry aims, whether they've said them out loud or not: the plateau they want past, the hours they want back, the version of the business they could finally step out of. And they carry instincts, about what to do next or about what's quietly going wrong, and those instincts are not casual opinions but the compressed reading of years spent inside the business every day, in a way no advisor ever will be.

Which is why contradicting that instinct is the fastest way to be ignored. Walk in with two weeks of analysis and tell an owner their gut is wrong, and what they hear, rightly, is that you've set your spreadsheet against their lived experience of their own business and decided the spreadsheet wins. They'll dismiss you, and they'll usually be right to.

So we start somewhere other than the analysis. We start from the assumption that the instinct is signal, and that the work is to find what it already knows.

Instinct is home base. It's the reading the owner takes from where they're standing, and however rough it is, it points at the thing they're really trying to reach: the North Star the whole engagement is supposed to be steering by. That's what makes it more reliable than it looks, because the gut can be badly wrong about the number while being entirely right about the direction. Our bid could have come back thirty percent out after three weeks of work and the instinct still wouldn't have failed, because what it was really reading was whether the proposal was worth our time at all, whether it carried us toward where the firm was trying to go. The figure was negotiable; the direction was not.

There is a home truth behind every instinct, if you treat it strategically instead of marking it right or wrong. The instinct is a symptom, and the symptom is pointing at a cause. So when an owner comes in certain about something, the move isn't to go away and test whether they're correct. The move is to stay in the conversation and ask what they're seeing that the rest of us aren't: what changed, what it feels like, when they first noticed it, what they're afraid it means. You're not agreeing with their conclusion, and you're certainly not flattering it. You're working backward from the feeling to the thing underneath it, because that thing is almost always more useful than the conclusion they reached on top of it.

That decoding is its own discipline, and it's where the next stage lives. Instinct can't lay out the path and it can't validate itself, and on its own it's still a hunch you'd be reckless to bet several million dollars, or a client's livelihood, on. The job of the second stage, Insight, is to inform the instinct and shape it against what the data actually says.

What Insight is not is a verdict. When the numbers and the instinct pull in different directions, that gap is not proof the owner was wrong; it's the most useful thing in the room. It's the clearest signal you'll get of the home truth underneath, the aim the instinct has been quietly steering toward the whole time.

And that aim is the entire point of the work. The real axis of advisory is the owner's life measured against the future they're trying to reach, and the owner can't read that axis on their own from inside the daily fire. This is where it first surfaces: not as a goal written on an onboarding form, but as a hunch they can't fully account for. Honoring instinct means taking that hunch seriously enough to ask what it's protecting, long before anyone's put the aim into words, and most advisors never get there, because they're too busy reaching for the part where they get to be right.

So the first move in any advisory relationship isn't analysis. It's listening to the instinct closely enough to hear the aim inside it, and holding off on the spreadsheet long enough that the owner is still in the room when you find it. The number on the blank page was never the answer. It was the star you set out toward, before anyone had drawn the map.

Advisory work lives and dies in conversations — and conversations disappear the moment they end unless you capture them properly. We've been using Fathom for a number of years now for our meeting recordings, and whilst there are plenty of note-taking options out there — Notion offers one, Google Gemini records when you're on Google Meet, Zoom has built-in AI transcription — we keep coming back to Fathom for a few specific reasons.

The first is that it's platform-agnostic. It works across Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams — whatever your client happens to use. If you're running a practice with clients on different platforms, that matters more than any single feature.

The second is team recordings. Kristina and I can benefit from each other's client conversations where appropriate, which means insights don't stay locked in one person's head. For any practice with more than one person doing client-facing work, this is where the real value compounds.

And the third is the API. We can take Fathom's meeting templates, transcripts, summaries, and action items and feed them downstream into other tools and systems. The work they're doing on agent-less audio transcription keeps getting better, and they've recently added universal search across all of your meetings — so when you need to find what a client said about their pricing strategy six months ago, you can actually find it.

If you want to try it, this link gives you a free month of Premium: Get a free month of Fathom Premium →

Full disclosure: if you sign up through that link, I get a free month too. That's the extent of it.

The next edition of the newsletter will continue around our circle and discuss the real world of insight, and how analysis allows us to interpret the signals of instinct.

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Know someone navigating the compliance-to-advisory transition? Forward this email — or better yet, send them to baifokal.beehiiv.com to subscribe.get "good meeting, thanks" as they walk out the door, that one's for you. Hit reply and tell me about it — I'm genuinely curious how many of us have had that exact experience.