Every project has a person whose opinion is the one that actually matters. On a healthy project, you talk to that person regularly and you don't even think about it. On an unhealthy project, you spend weeks talking to someone who isn't that person — and you don't find out until something important needs to happen, and nothing happens.
The person who advocates to hire you is often not that person. They're your champion, and champions matter — but champions don't write checks. Secondhand trust, relayed through a champion, is brittle. It evaporates the moment they go on vacation, change jobs, or get overruled. You want to find the actual decision maker on day one. Not week four.
The trick: confound them with a real choice
Here's our favorite trick, which sounds mean but is actually kind: put a real, consequential decision in front of your current point of contact. Something that, if answered, would genuinely unblock the project.
If they answer it, great — they're the decision maker. If they say "let me check with someone" or "I'll have to circle back," you also know. That "someone" is the real decision maker, and now you have a concrete reason to ask for a meeting with them: "since this kind of question keeps needing their input, can we just get them on the next call?" Your contact is often relieved, because you've given them cover to stop pretending they have authority they don't.
Why this matters
We once spent weeks with a contact who wasn't empowered to make any of the decisions we needed. Every week, a question went back to their team. Every week, the answer came back fuzzy, if at all. Their designer was working on the wrong thing. Their developers had priorities we couldn't influence. When we finally forced the issue and got the COO on a call, everything moved in twenty minutes that had been stuck for a month. That month cost them real money and cost us real trust, and it was entirely avoidable.
When something smells off, go up
The corollary is just as important. If you start to smell that something is off — late payments, vague answers, contradictory instructions, a contact who seems nervous — do not try to resolve it at the level you're talking to. Go up. More than once we've found that our contact was the problem: not authorized to ask what they were asking, or hiding something from their own leadership, or in over their head. In every case, the fix was the same — get the actual boss on a call, lay out what we were seeing, ask for clarity. Going over someone's head feels rude. It is less rude than letting a project quietly rot.
The rule, in one line
If you cannot name the person who can say "yes, do it" without checking with anyone, you do not yet know who your client is. Keep looking until you can.