Professions · Consultants
Meeting notes for consultants.
A discovery day is eight conversations back to back, and everything you will later charge for is buried in them.
Discovery is deliberately intensive: interviews with a finance director, two operations managers, a frustrated team leader and whoever happens to be in the corridor, all in a day. The findings deck is built entirely from those conversations, and typing during them costs you the follow-up question that would have surfaced the real issue. Recording each session gives you the raw material and lets you spend the day listening.
Stakeholder interviews also have a political dimension that speaker labels handle neatly. When the operations lead and the finance lead describe the same process incompatibly, that contradiction is the finding, and it is only usable if you can attribute both accounts precisely. GetNotes separates the voices and pulls out the decisions and actions from workshops where twelve people generated forty ideas and agreed on six.
Site visits are where bot-based tools simply do not apply. A walk round a warehouse, a factory floor or a branch office is a conversation with no meeting link, held while moving. A phone in a pocket captures it, and the transcript that comes back is often more useful than the notes you would have written standing up with a clipboard.
Where it earns its keep
Eight interviews in one day on a client site
You arrive at nine, you leave at six, and the deck is due Friday. Each conversation was full of specifics — numbers, names of systems, a story about the month-end that explains everything. Recorded and summarised, that day becomes a searchable evidence base rather than a notebook you cannot decode.
Two stakeholders describing the same process differently
Operations says the handoff happens on Tuesday; finance says it never happens at all. That gap is the recommendation. Speaker-labelled transcripts let you quote both accounts precisely in the findings, which is far more persuasive than asserting that views differ.
Scope creep agreed across a café table
"While you are in there, could you also look at…" is how projects grow without a change order. A recording and a written summary of what was discussed makes the follow-up email specific, so the boundary of the engagement is documented before anyone starts work on the extra thing.
How GetNotes works
- Record or upload. Hit record on your phone or laptop in the room — or drop in an audio file you already have. No bot joins anything.
- It writes it down. Every word transcribed, every speaker labelled, in 90+ languages including ones that switch mid-sentence.
- Share the minutes.Summary, decisions, and action items with owners — ready before everyone's back at their desk.
Questions, answered
Can GetNotes capture a walking site visit?
Yes, and it is one of the clearest gaps in bot-based tools. A walkthrough of a warehouse or a factory floor has no meeting link for a notetaker to join. GetNotes records from a phone in your hand or pocket, and afterwards you get a transcript with speaker labels plus a summary of what was observed and agreed.
Do clients need accounts or an app to be in a recorded meeting?
No. Nobody but you needs anything installed — you record the room on your own device, and the client sees a phone on the table rather than a bot appearing in a participant list. You should still tell everyone present that you are recording before you start, which is both courteous and, in many places, required.
How do the notes help with the findings deck?
Each meeting produces a summary, a decisions list and action items with owners, on top of the full transcript. For consulting work the transcript is usually the valuable part, because it lets you search for the exact phrase a stakeholder used and quote it in the report rather than paraphrase it into blandness.
What about workshops with a dozen participants?
GetNotes diarises automatically, so a busy workshop comes back split by voice with the agreed actions extracted. Put the recording device near the middle of the room rather than at one end of a long table. With significant crosstalk, treat the transcript as a strong draft and check any line you plan to attribute.
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