The interview is the engine of the whole Content Play service. Everything we publish for a client traces back to a 30 to 45 minute conversation held once every month or two. New clients are sometimes sceptical that a chat that short can feed a content calendar for months, so here’s exactly what happens inside one.
Before the call: nothing
There’s no brief form, no agenda circulated in advance, no pre-reading, and nothing to prepare. Some clients feel they should prepare anyway, and we talk them out of it. Prepared answers sound prepared. The material we’re after is the stuff you already carry around: the client problems you dealt with this week, the advice you’ve given three times this month, the industry development you have strong views on. If your week has been chaotic and full of client fires, that’s not a distraction from the interview. That is the interview.
What we actually ask
The conversation is loosely structured around a handful of angles. What you’re seeing in the market at the moment. What problems clients are bringing you right now. Which questions you answer more than once. What you’ve changed your mind about lately. From there, we follow the energy. When an answer picks up pace, or you start explaining something the way you’d explain it to a client, we dig in, because that’s where the usable material lives.
The session is recorded, which matters more than it sounds. You’re not dictating or performing, you’re talking to someone who’s genuinely interested, and the recording quietly captures your phrasing, your examples, and your way of building an argument. All of that ends up in the content.
Why 45 minutes goes so far
People speak at somewhere around 130 words a minute, so a 45-minute conversation is comfortably over 5,000 words of raw expert material. Unlike a written brief, it’s dense with stories, opinions and specifics rather than positioning statements.
Then each insight fans out. One strong idea from your interview might become a blog article, a long-form LinkedIn post, two or three short posts, a carousel, and a quote card. That’s not the same content repeated six times. Different formats reach different readers: the managing partner who reads long articles, the founder who saves carousels, and the adviser who shares quote cards are different prospects at different points in their education. A single interview usually carries several strong insights, and each one supports a small family of pieces. Stack those up and one conversation produces months of content.
Your expertise is the only ingredient
Nothing in the output comes from researching the internet and recycling what others in your industry are saying. The interview is the sole source: your ideas, your experience, your advice. It’s also why the content can’t be copied. Competitors can see what you publish, but they can’t reverse-engineer the years of client work behind it.
This is the reason the whole system starts with a conversation rather than a form, and I’ve made the longer case for that in why we start with an interview.
How often we do it
For most clients the cadence is once every month or two. For partner firms, each partner is interviewed every two to three months, with scheduling coordinated through the marketing manager so nobody is chasing diaries. Either way, the interview stays the only recurring demand on your time. Turn up, talk for 45 minutes, and get back to work.