Six things. Four of them are sentences you write once, not products you buy.

1. A voicemail greeting that says your name, when you return calls, and what to do in an emergency.

2. A response time you can actually meet, published in the same words on your profile, your greeting and your email signature.

3. Something that answers a missed call when you can't — even if that is only a greeting that tells the caller what happens next.

4. A consent form, ready to send, covering the work, the fee, confidentiality and how you communicate between sessions.

5. A way to take payment and issue a receipt with your registration details on it.

6. Somewhere the contact gets written down, before you have four of them in your head.

Notice what is not on the list: a website, a logo, a fax number, a video platform, or a business name. None of those affect what happens in the ninety seconds after a stranger dials your number, and that ninety seconds is the whole of your intake.

What actually happens on that first call?

Usually nothing, because you are in a session.

That is not a failure of preparation; it is the structural condition of this work. Therapists describe it in almost identical language: cannot answer during sessions, not always time between them, and by the end of the day too late to call back and look professional. Meanwhile the caller has contacted several therapists and will go with whoever gets back to them.

So the thing to prepare is not the conversation. It is what happens in the gap between their call and your callback, and there are only three levers:

Tell them when. A greeting that says "I return calls within one business day" converts silence into a wait, which people tolerate.

Give them something to do. A booking link, an email address, a text — anything asynchronous that lets them move without you.

Make the acknowledgement automatic. A reply to a missed call, sent without you being free, is the difference between "nobody answered" and "someone knows I called". Therapists have been hand-building this for years out of whatever tools they have — the pattern of never answering live, and texting an introduction after a missed call with no voicemail, is described publicly and described as working.

What should the greeting actually say?

Short, and four parts:

• Who you are, with your credential

• That you can't take the call, and when you return them

• What to do if it cannot wait — name the local crisis service and emergency number explicitly

• What to leave, or where to go instead — a name and number, or a booking link

Record it before you publish your number anywhere. The most common version of "my intake isn't working" is a number that rings through to a default greeting saying nothing.

What about calls that leave no message?

Decide your rule before it happens, because you will be deciding it under pressure otherwise.

The genuine dilemma: a missed call with no voicemail could be a prospective client or could be spam, and practitioners describe a blanket no-callback policy while knowing it loses referrals. There is also a real clinical argument for not calling back unknown numbers — someone reaching out about abuse or violence may have used a borrowed phone, and a return call can land badly.

The workable position is to make the request explicit in the greeting rather than leaving the caller to guess, so the people you want to hear from know exactly what to do.

What do I need ready to send?

Have these written and saved before the first call, so responding takes two minutes rather than an evening:

• A short reply to an inquiry: your fee, your availability, next step

• Your consent form

• An intake form, if you use one

• A polite referral-out message for people you cannot see — wrong fit, no availability, wrong scope. You will need this more often than you expect and it is miserable to draft in the moment.

And the consult call itself?

Two practical notes.

Schedule it, don't chase it. Phone tag over a fifteen-minute consult is a documented time sink, and practitioners describe working harder to get someone in the door than the prospective client does. A booking link for consults removes most of it.

Say what it is. Fifteen minutes, no charge if that is your policy, and what you will cover. A caller who knows the shape of the call is far more likely to keep it.

The short version

Before you publish a number anywhere: record the greeting, decide the response time and put it in three places, have a consent form and a fee reply ready to send, know how you will take payment, and decide what happens to a call that leaves no message. That is an afternoon of work and it is the difference between an intake channel and a phone that rings.

About Rivet

Rivet is a Canadian practice line built for therapists — a separate number for calls, texts and voicemail, with video sessions and clinical tools in the same place. Your data stays in Canada, and transcription runs on Rivet's own hardware rather than a third-party AI service.

One plan, $65 CAD a month, everything included. Fourteen-day trial, no card.

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