Leads & intake

What this covers

Long before there is a contract, there is a renovation — a house, an idea of what it should become, and a series of conversations that turn one into the other. That is real work, and it needs somewhere to live.

A lead is the record of a renovation before it is won. It holds the property, the people, the scope being discussed, and every meeting held along the way. It is the reason the design conversation you have in month one is still on the record in month nine.

What a lead carries

A lead is more than a name and a phone number. It carries the shape of the renovation being discussed:

Project phase — where the design conversation currently stands: Scope, Schematic Design, Design Development, Final Design, Build.

Project scope — what Story has been engaged to do: Design-Build, Design-Only, Build-Only, or Interiors-Only.

Home type and square footage — the kind of property being renovated and how much of it is in scope.

These are set early and refined as the conversation develops. They decide which parts of the process an engagement actually uses: a design-only engagement and a design-build engagement follow different paths, and the lead is where that is established.

Meetings

Design happens in meetings, and those meetings are part of the record rather than calendar entries that disappear once they are over. Meetings attach directly to the lead:

Intake — the first conversation
Job walk — walking the property
Visioning presentation — presenting the direction
Finish presentation — presenting materials and finishes
Final design presentation — presenting the completed design

That sequence is the design process. Because the meetings sit on the lead, what was presented and when travels forward with the work.

Forms

Forms are structured questionnaires attached to the lead. They gather the answers Story needs in a consistent shape rather than scattered across an email thread.

Visioning is one of these forms — the questionnaire that establishes what you want the renovation to be before anyone draws it. Its answers feed the visioning presentation, which is where you see that direction come back as design.

From lead to project

Story intake creates the client and the project directly. The design work that happens before anything is signed is recorded against the job it belongs to, rather than sitting in a separate sales system that has to be copied over later.

When the work is won, the lead becomes the project. The scope, the phase, the meetings, and the form answers carry through — nothing is retyped, and the history of how the project was shaped stays attached to it.

What you see as a client

You experience this area as the meetings themselves and the questionnaires you fill in before them. What you say in a visioning form and what is presented in a visioning meeting both become part of the project record, which is what later design work and pricing are built on.

How a project works — where a lead sits in the project structure
Design — the phased design process the lead feeds
Quotes — how the discussed scope gets priced