How a solo consultant uses a market research agent

What question is worth a brief?

Pick one question tied to a decision. Who buys this offer. What adjacent firms charge, if you can find public figures. What a client's industry is arguing about this month. A vague topic produces a vague brief.

Write the question in one sentence, plus what you will do with the answer. If you cannot name the decision, wait. Research without a decision becomes a pile of links.

What should the brief contain?

A useful brief has the question, five to ten sources with links, two sentences on what each source actually says, and the gaps. It separates what a source stated from what the draft infers.

Ask for dates on every source. A report from several years ago can still matter, and you should see the year before you lean on it. If the agent cannot find a date, the brief should say that.

How do you check the sources?

Open every source you might repeat to a client. Skim the others. If a link is dead or the page says something else, drop it and tell the role. That correction is part of the routine.

Do not pass a brief to a client as your own research until you have opened the sources behind the lines you keep. The approval gate is that reading.

How do you set up the research agent?

1. Write the question template. One sentence for the question, one sentence for the decision it serves, and the maximum length of the brief.
2. Require links and dates. Put that in the persona. No source line without a link. No link without a date, or an explicit note that the date was missing.
3. Separate statement from inference. Ask for two labels: what the source says, and what you might conclude. You edit the second.
4. Run one real question. Use a decision you actually have this month. Open the top sources the same day.
5. Keep a source you trusted. Add one brief you checked to the example file, with your notes in the margin of what you cut.
6. File the brief with the decision. Store it next to the proposal or the offer note it was meant to inform, so you can see later whether it helped.

What does a research routine look like?

What are the approval rules?

The research agent may collect sources and draft the brief. You decide what is solid enough to use.

It may not present the brief to a client. You do that after you have opened the sources behind the lines you keep.

It may not invent a statistic, a quote, or a citation. A missing source stays missing.

It may not collapse inference into fact. The two stay labeled.

It may not run a second question until you have finished or dropped the first.

Common questions