Most consultants spend the first weeks of an engagement finding the problem. Your client is paying for what comes after.
Surface runs the first-round interviews across your client’s team in parallel and sets them against the client’s records, so the engagement starts from evidence. The client, the method and the relationship stay yours.
Fig. 13, The library: A two-storey library façade with paired columns and tall doorways at the top of a broad stair, in the manner of Celsus at Ephesus.
What consultants say about discovery
The first round is the slowest part of the work.
“Discovery becomes 80% herding cats and 20% actual strategic thinking.”
“We spend four weeks ‘diagnosing’ the problem... In parallel, we also have interviews with specific functions to get further context.”
“I find 2-3 30 min to 1hr interviews a day is doable, so 10-15 a week on average.”
Quoted from consultants’ public forum posts, in their own words. They are not Surface clients.
What you get
The first round, done in parallel.
Surface does the part of discovery that scales badly by hand. The thinking, the recommendation and the client stay with you.
Interviews
Up to ten of the client’s people at once, about fifteen minutes each, by voice or text
Records
The client’s exports that go with the question, read as part of the assisted pilot
The brief
Each finding with its quotes and records, and the explanation it ruled out
What stays yours
The client relationship, the question, your method and your price
How it runs
Three steps, inside your engagement.
01
You bring the client’s question
We agree the question, the people and the records with you in a first call.
02
Surface interviews and reads
The client’s people talk or type in their own time, each with a private link. Surface reads the records alongside.
03
You take the evidence forward
Each finding arrives with its quotes and records. The recommendation is yours.
How to work together
Refer a client, or deliver together.
Two ways to work with Surface. Terms are agreed in the first call and written down.
Question
Refer a client
Deliver together
Who the client works with
Surface
You, with Surface behind the work
Who scopes and presents
Surface
You
Whose method
Surface’s
Yours
How you earn
Agreed in the first call
Agreed in the first call
For assessment firms
Your clients get the scores and ask you what is behind them.
Surface turns the follow-up into one-to-one conversations with the people behind the scores, and sets them against the client’s data.
For CX and mystery-shopping agencies
Your shoppers record what happened.
Surface adds the front-line account and the client’s records beside each wave, so your report can show what sits behind the score.
One finding
What a finding looks like.
From an illustrative example: a chain of gyms whose mystery shops kept showing the same skipped step. Training was the first explanation tested. The evidence ruled it out.
Finding for reviewIllustrative · Cat. 02
Staff skipped the freeze offer where the club bonus counts only new members.
Reported
“A freeze doesn’t count for anything. A new member does.”
Observed
Freeze offered in 22% of cancellations at clubs on the new-member bonus; 49% on the older scheme.
Prescribed
Offer a freeze before processing any cancellation.
Ruled outTraining. Completion is 96% in both groups, and the gap follows the bonus scheme.
Fifteen minutes for each of your client’s people, talk or type.
Each person chooses how they are quoted: by name, by role only, or not quoted at all. The client sees findings and the quotes people allowed, never a transcript.
Surface is built in Cape Town by Patrick Nesbitt, a chartered accountant and CFA charterholder who audited banks at KPMG and worked in equity research and private equity before building AI products. It reads evidence the way an audit does: what should happen, what did happen, and what explains the difference.
Before we begin
Questions people ask.
Who owns the data, exclusivity, whether a client can later buy direct, and using your own interview guide are agreed in the first call, and written down.
Does Surface replace our method?
No. Surface runs the interviews and the analysis for the question you bring. The method, the recommendation and the client relationship stay yours.
How is the client’s data handled?
Interview data is stored in the EU (Stockholm). The application and AI processing run in the United States. Security documents are available to client companies under NDA.
Which languages can people use?
Interviews are in English for now.
The offer
One question, ten people, one brief.
We agree one question about one process with you, interview up to ten of your people by voice or text, read the records that go with it, and take you through a brief that shows the evidence for every finding.
