Two clocks run when a firm signs. Ours — building your agent, testing it, wiring booking and email — moves in days, and we commit to it. The carriers' — registering your firm so text messages deliver — takes 1–3 weeks, belongs to no one you or we can call, and cannot be paid or automated away. Most vendors let you discover the second clock after you sign. Here is the whole schedule up front.
| When | What goes live | Whose clock | What you will notice |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kickoff day 0 |
The paperwork that starts the long clock. We submit your carrier registration — your firm's legal name, EIN and business address — the day you sign, because every day it is not filed is a day added to the end. Your phone number is provisioned or ported the same day. | starts theirs | One short call to collect three facts about your firm. That is most of what we need from you. |
| Days 1–2 ours to keep |
Your phone is answered. The agent is built to your intake rules, tested in conversation, then tested on a real call — adversarially, by us, before any caller meets it. From here, every call is answered 24/7, qualified, and booked or queued for a call back. | ours | This is the commitment we put in writing: answering your inbound calls within 48 hours of kickoff. |
| Days 3–5 ours to keep |
Booking and email follow-up. A booking link per practice area, wired into the agent. Email that sends from your own address, authenticated so it lands in inboxes. Your dashboard opens — every call, transcript and lead in one place. And we agree, in writing, who answers if the AI is down at 2am. | ours | Missed-caller follow-up starts working by email. You approve the wording before anything sends. |
| Weeks 1–3 the wait |
Text messaging waits — and only text messaging. US carriers must approve every business that sends texts (the registration filed on day 0, called A2P 10DLC). It is reviewed on the carriers' side, it typically takes one to three weeks, and no vendor can speed it up — anyone who promises texting "on day one" is either already registered under a shared identity you would not want, or not telling you about this page of the schedule. | theirs | Nothing stops. Calls, booking and email keep running the whole time. |
| On approval date theirs |
Texting switches on, and the engine is complete. The moment your registration clears, follow-up adds SMS — the channel missed callers actually answer. We will not promise the date, because it is not ours to promise. We will tell you the day it clears. | ours again | Fully live: answered, booked, followed up by text and email, all in your dashboard. |
One exception: Financial Analysis has no carrier wait at all. It sends no text messages, so there is nothing to register — it is typically live in days, start to finish.
A2P 10DLC is the US carriers' registration system for business text messaging. Every firm registers as its own brand — your legal name, your EIN, your address — so that when a text arrives from your number, the carriers know exactly who sent it. That is good for you and for your clients: it is why registered texts deliver and spam gets filtered.
The cost of that trust is a human review queue on the carrier side. One to three weeks is typical. It cannot be expedited, automated, or done once and shared between firms. The only move that helps is filing early — so we file on day 0, and build everything else while it runs. We would rather name the wait on this page than have you discover it in week two.
Calls answered within 48 hours of kickoff — that one is ours, and we commit to it. Texting arrives when the carriers approve your firm, and any vendor who tells you otherwise is telling you something else too.