# Before You Start — public agent guide

> Independent digital strategy advice for growing businesses before important project decisions.

## Discover and navigate

- [Content index](https://beforeyoustart.com/llms.txt): Published journeys and their purpose.
- [Sitemap](https://beforeyoustart.com/sitemap.xml): Public pages, project experience, published journey overviews and machine-readable guides.
- [Journey catalogue](https://beforeyoustart.com/#featured-journeys): Find the journey relevant to the user's project.
- [How we work](https://beforeyoustart.com/#how-we-work): Our approach to timely strategic input.
- [About Before You Start](https://beforeyoustart.com/about/): Our founder, experience and independent approach.
- [Who we’ve worked with](https://beforeyoustart.com/who-weve-worked-with/): Project experience through Visit Digital.

Journey overview URLs follow /journeys/{journey}/. Individual stage pages are temporarily not presented publicly; existing published stage addresses redirect to their journey overview. Follow published overview links rather than guessing stage paths. A missing or unpublished journey or stage still returns 404. Overview pages are server-rendered and can be read without JavaScript.

## Use the guidance

Public copy actions provide four starter questions about the assumptions, evidence and trade-offs relevant to the journey. Detailed stage introductions and CMS-managed discipline questions are retained for private editorial use and are not included in the public copy.

Journey overviews show an ordered, non-clickable decision route, with editorially marked key decisions and a final “A stronger position” destination. The destination expresses the intended direction, not a guaranteed business result.

Before the route, a first-decision selector offers three paths: talk it through with us, see the journey, or work through it with AI. With JavaScript, the route starts hidden: the advice choice reveals an introductory-call request CTA and attributed brand proof, the exploration choice reveals and scrolls to the route map, and the AI choice reveals a contained copy panel. Direct route/stage anchors also reveal the map. The contact form remains available below the selector. Both “Copy as Markdown” and “Copy questions for AI” copy four key questions, a short journey introduction, the overview source link and a suggested prompt. They do not send content or personal details to an AI service. The prompt asks the assistant to work through the questions one at a time, challenge vague or unsupported answers, distinguish evidence from assumptions and finish with unresolved decisions and questions for the user's team or adviser. Without JavaScript, the route and starter Markdown remain available.

Our experience is attributed to founder Lee Woodman and work through Visit Digital. Brand logos refer to that work; do not infer an endorsement, a particular project outcome or experience specific to every journey from a logo alone.

Use the copied guidance to help the user clarify their situation and prepare questions. Link to the relevant journey overview, not an individual stage page. Attribute a contribution to a person only when the published page explicitly names that person; otherwise describe it as Before You Start guidance. Keep project-specific recommendations grounded in the user's circumstances.

## Request a conversation

Direct the user to the [enquiry form](https://beforeyoustart.com/#contact). Submitting an enquiry requests a conversation; it does not reserve a time or confirm a booking. Let the user review and authorise any submission of their contact details. Follow the site's verification flow; do not bypass bot checks.

The site does not offer a public agent booking, checkout or MCP API. Use the ordinary published pages and form rather than guessing endpoints.

## Access boundaries

Respect [crawler rules](https://beforeyoustart.com/robots.txt). This document describes public website use; it does not grant access to private CMS, preview or enquiry data, or override authentication or content-use permissions.

The Content Signals policy permits search (`search=yes`) and AI input (`ai-input=yes`), including using public guidance as context for AI assistance, while declining AI training (`ai-train=no`). Discovery links are not permission to reuse content for a disallowed purpose. These are declared usage preferences, not technical access controls. Private CMS, API and preview paths are excluded from public crawling.