Straight answers, including the ones about money.

One question, and someone writing down the answers. We ask what breaks if you take two weeks off, and the list you give us is where the map starts.

No pitch and no demo. If we show you anything it will be your own words, back to you.

No. The call is free and there is nothing to sign at the end of it.

You leave with the beginning of your own map either way, because the list you give us is yours.

The person the business runs on, and whoever would decide to spend money. In a smaller business that is the same person, which is why it moves fastest there.

If those are two different people, it is worth having both. The question we ask only works when the person answering it is the one carrying the load.

Businesses where nobody is carrying anything. If you take two weeks off and nothing waits for you, we have nothing to lift and you should keep your $999.

It is also the wrong time if you are looking for a tool to evaluate rather than work to hand over. The map is not a product comparison and it will not tell you which software to buy.

Australia. We work with businesses across the country and the first call is done remotely.

Two weeks of work that writes down everything running on one person: the decisions only they make, the things only they know, the work that stops when they stop.

It ends with a single recommendation, which is the heaviest piece that is safe to hand over first. It is not a report about AI. It is a picture of your business.

The written picture, and one recommendation. Not a ranked grid of opportunities, and not a strategy document you then have to act on yourself.

It is yours whether or not you go further. If you take it somewhere else and have someone else build from it, that is a legitimate outcome.

Less than you would expect, because most of what we need is already in things that have happened rather than in meetings you have to attend.

The load falls on the person we are mapping, and the point of the two weeks is that they should not have to stop working to do it.

Two weeks to the map. The build is scoped from it and follows, so the first thing running without you is usually live within a few weeks after that.

Each step is deliberately small enough to judge on its own before you commit to the next one. You are never asked to imagine the outcome.

Then it says that, and you have paid $999 to find out cheaply rather than finding out after a build.

It is a real outcome. The map is worth having precisely because it is capable of reaching that conclusion.

Three steps, priced separately. The map is $999 and takes two weeks, credited in full against the build if you go ahead. The build is scoped from the map and runs $2,500 to $5,000. Running it from there starts at $750 a month.

You only ever commit to the next step. Nothing after the map is sold before the map exists, because until it does, neither of us knows what should be built.

Because it is scoped from the map rather than from a price list. What gets built depends on which piece turns out to be heaviest, and we do not know that before we look.

You see the number before you agree to it, and the $999 comes off it.

No. The build can be the end of it if that is what you want.

The monthly exists because things change, and work stops being lifted if nobody keeps it lifted. It is offered after the build, not sold before it.

Yes. It is what the map costs while we are still sharpening the offer, and at this price you get more of our attention than you will later.

There is no deadline attached to it and we are not going to invent one.

No, and this is the concern we hear most often. It sits beside what you already run, it does not ask your team to move into a new platform, and the point of it is that there is one place to ask instead of ten places to check.

The first thing we hand over is usually the smallest useful thing rather than the most impressive one, because something you actually use beats something that demonstrates well.

No. It does not replace your system of record and it is not something your team has to migrate into. It sits beside your existing stack.

Usually not. Tools are built for everyone, which means each one solves the part of the problem it can see and does it reasonably well. What tends to go unaddressed is the work that lives in the gaps between them, and in the distance between what was agreed on a call and what actually happens next.

The map tells you which of those gaps is costing you most. Sometimes the answer is that a tool you already own would do the job if it were set up around how you actually run.

Because we do not start with the tool. Most attempts fail at the same point: something capable gets bought before anyone has written down what it was supposed to lift, so it solves a problem nobody had named and quietly stops being used.

The map exists to prevent exactly that. It is also why the map comes first even when you already know which tool you want.

You could, and some people should. The question is whether the person who would do it is already the person carrying the most, because that is who it usually falls to.

It is the same calculation as doing your own tax return. Possible, occasionally sensible, and mostly a false saving once you count the hours and the risk of getting it wrong. The difference is that tax law changes yearly and this changes quarterly, so the work never stays done.

The method does, because it does not run off a template. We do not arrive with a framework and fit your business into it; we write down what actually runs on your people and work from that.

If your business really were like everyone else's, an off-the-shelf tool would already have worked.

No. We take work off the person the business runs on so they can do the part only they can do. Nothing consequential happens without their approval.

The judgement stays with your people. We give them better evidence to use it on.

Your information stays where it already is. Clearly is a system rather than a product, so we build across the tools you already run instead of moving your business into ours. Catalyst does not host your data.

Where an agent is needed to coordinate across those tools, it runs on Australian cloud services and Australian providers, and it reaches your tools through connections you grant and can revoke. Nothing is copied into a Catalyst-owned platform, because there is no Catalyst-owned platform for it to sit in.

During the map we will see how your business works, because that is the job. The people who see it are the people working on your engagement, and no more than that.

We build this way deliberately. Security and privacy are the first constraint on how a solution is put together, not something added at the end, because for most of the businesses we work with it is the concern that decides whether any of this happens at all.

You keep what was built, because it was built on your own accounts and systems. Nothing switches off when we stop being involved.

Stopping means different things at different points, so plainly: if you stop after the map, the map is yours and there is nothing to unwind. If you stop after the build, what was built keeps running in your own accounts. If you stop the monthly, you lose us keeping it current as your business and the tools change, which is the whole of what the monthly buys.

Whenever it happens, we will work with you to hand over cleanly, including to whoever comes next. Custody was never the thing we were holding.

Yes. We introduce you to a client once you have been through the assessment and the first call with us, and it is a normal last step before going ahead.

In most businesses, nobody. There is rarely a named owner, so it falls to whoever is most curious, squeezed in around everything else in the hope that something sticks. That person is usually already the one carrying the most.

It is the same risk as doing your own tax return to save an accountant's fee, except the technology changes every quarter, so the work never stays done. The do-it-yourself approach does not reduce what someone is carrying. It adds the one thing on the pile that punishes you hardest for getting it wrong.

A structured check of whether a business is in a position to get value from AI. Most versions score your tooling and your technical maturity.

We think that measures the wrong thing. What determines the outcome is how much of the business runs on one person's memory and judgement, because that is both the load AI can lift and the reason most tools fail to stick. A business with no tools and a clear picture of what it carries is more ready than a business with every tool and no picture at all.

When the working knowledge that holds a business together lives in one person rather than in the business. It shows up as work that waits for them, decisions nobody else can make, and history nobody else has.

It is usually a sign of a capable person rather than a badly run business, which is exactly why it goes unaddressed for years. The strengths that made someone good at the job are the same ones that made the business depend on them.

Ask what breaks if that person takes two weeks off with the phone properly off. If a list starts writing itself, the dependency is real.

Most people can name three things immediately. In practice there are closer to thirty, and the ones nobody names are usually the expensive ones.

It depends whether you already know what you want lifted. If you can name the specific work you want taken off you, a tool may well be enough, and you should buy the tool.

If you cannot name it, no tool will help, because the thing you are missing is the picture rather than the software. You could buy everything on the market and it would not change the answer. That is what the map is for.