Your first ninety days

The plan, with tripwires

This capstone compresses the whole course into a sequence you can start Monday. The checkpoints matter as much as the tasks. Each one is a fork: hit it and continue, miss it and make a specific change, not a vague effort increase. The failure modes in "Failure modes and hard truths" are built into the tripwires so you do not have to feel them first.

Days 1 to 14: build the machine

The setup lessons become a checklist. Form the entity and open the account per "The lean stack: opening for under $1,000," run the state license check from "Licenses, contracts, and the law," and choose the niche using the written test in "Picking your niche." Build the two-tab tracker, clients and candidates, and set up the professional email. Rewrite your LinkedIn profile so it says plainly what you now do, because every outreach message links to it and a profile still wearing your old corporate title undercuts the pitch.

Then the first lists: one hundred target companies in the niche, gathered from job boards and funding announcements per "Finding your first clients," and the warm network list, former colleagues who became hiring managers. Draft the two outreach messages, the pitch and the relationship opener, and the candidate outreach template from "Sourcing candidates who aren't applying."

Runway check runs in parallel from day one: the burn and coverage numbers from "Working for free: the cash-flow truth," written down, reviewed every two weeks against reality.

Days 15 to 30: start the engines

Outreach begins. Client side: the weekly batch goes out, follow-ups scheduled, warm-network conversations booked as calls rather than messages. Candidate side: run the sourcing searches daily in the thirty-to-forty-five-minute blocks from "A real week," even with no signed client yet, because a small warm pool of screened candidates turns your first client call from a promise into an inventory.

Days 31 to 60: first fee agreements, first submissions

The middle month is where the pipeline forms. Fee agreements signed using "The fee agreement," the model reviewed once by the attorney before the first signature, and the first submissions going to real clients. Screens run per "The thirty-minute screen," write-ups go out, and the tracker fills with stages. Business development continues every week regardless, which is tripwire number one's precondition.

The day-60 checkpoint is the honest one. By now you should hold at least one signed fee agreement and have made at least one submission to a live role. Zero signed agreements at day sixty does not mean work harder. It means something specific is broken, and the two candidates are the message or the niche: replies but no calls means the pitch, silence across weeks means the target list. Fix the message by rewriting against the templates in "Finding your first clients." Fix the niche question by returning to the five-question test in "Picking your niche" and honestly re-scoring it. Change one variable, not both, and run another thirty days.

Days 61 to 90: first processes, first offers

The first full search cycles run. Candidates move through client interviews, offers may extend, and the closing disciplines from "Closing and the fall-off zone" get their first live repetitions. Invoices go out the day a candidate starts, and the first guarantee clocks begin. The Friday metrics review from "A real week" now has real trends in it: response rates by template, client reply rates by niche, submission-to-interview conversion.

Day 90's checkpoint is directional, not financial. A signed client, live submissions, and a process that has reached final interviews is a healthy quarter-old agency even with no fee banked yet, because the cycle from "The fee model and the math on one placement" takes longer than a quarter to complete from a standing start. What is not healthy at day 90: no process has reached a final round. That points at submission quality, and the fix is the write-up standard from "The thirty-minute screen," not more volume.

After ninety days

Month four onward is the same machine with better inputs: more warm candidates, a reworkable outreach list, testimonials from placed candidates and hiring managers. Month six without a single fee is the structural review point, where the honest options are a niche change, a message overhaul, or a decision to stop, taken as a business decision with numbers behind it rather than a mood.