Why does it take a week to schedule one expert call?

The following is an opinion piece written by Mark Pacitti, CFA - Founder & Managing Director of Woozle Research, a done-for-you primary research platform for investment professionals.

A question I get asked a lot on intro calls is some version of this:

"How are you running 30 calls in two weeks for our diligence sprint? With our current network we'd be lucky to get five done in that window."

The honest answer is that we run a fundamentally different business model. The traditional expert network sells itself on speed, but if you're running real volume on a real timeline, it isn't actually fast. It's just fast enough, on one call, when you've already cleared everything else off your desk.

Stack ten calls back to back across a four-week diligence sprint and the cracks start showing. Stack thirty and the model breaks.

Here's why.

The week it actually takes

The marketing copy says expert networks turn calls around in 24 to 48 hours. AlphaSights publicly quotes a 24-48 hour sourcing window. GLG and Third Bridge market sub-day turnaround on profiles. CleverX, an industry directory, is more honest: turnaround is "24 hours for common expertise to 1-2 weeks for highly specialized niche knowledge."

That's profile sourcing. Not the call.

The call itself takes longer because every step after profile delivery has its own queue time. Here's what actually happens between you sending the brief and the expert dialling in:

Day 1 — Brief. You write the brief. The associate reads it, asks two clarifying questions, sends it to their internal sourcing team.

Day 2-3 — Profile delivery. Three to six profiles arrive in your inbox. You review them, push back on two, ask for more.

Day 3-4 — Second pass. New profiles arrive. You pick one. The associate reaches out to confirm availability.

Day 4-5 — Compliance. The expert completes screening questions. The associate sends them to your in-house compliance team for sign-off. Compliance usually takes 24 hours, sometimes more if the expert has any history that needs review.

Day 5-6 — Scheduling. The expert is in Chicago. You're in London. The call has to be in their working hours. You have a 1:1 with your PM at 3pm on the day they're free. Reschedule.

Day 7 — Call happens. Maybe.

That is the median experience for a competent buy-side analyst at a top-tier expert network with a clean brief. It is not the worst case. The worst case is when the expert drops out 24 hours before the call — which AlphaSights reviewers on Glassdoor describe as a recurring failure mode — and you're back to Day 3.

The 24-48 hour SLA is a sourcing SLA. Not a delivery SLA. Almost nobody publishes the actual end-to-end time from brief to call because the answer isn't flattering.

Why it can't be faster than that

The traditional expert network model can't compress this timeline because the workflow is structurally a relay race.

Every step is owned by a different person. The Client Solutions associate writes the brief. A separate sourcing team searches the database. A separate compliance team screens the expert. The associate routes the candidates back to you. You and the expert play calendar tetris.

Each handoff is a queue. Each queue waits for somebody on the other side to pick it up between their own seven-call-a-week hurdle.

And critically: nobody in that chain is incentivised to compress the cycle. Their KPI is calls booked per month, not turnaround time per call. A call that takes seven days and a call that takes three both count as one call against the hurdle. So the system optimises for the path of least friction — which is whatever the queue does on its own pace.

Your urgency is not their urgency. Their urgency is hitting their monthly number.

What this does to a real diligence workload

The 7-day cycle wouldn't matter if you only ran one call. But that's not how primary research actually works.

A long/short hedge fund analyst covering 40 tickers is, per typical buy-side work patterns, running around 30 expert calls per ticker over a one-year coverage cycle. That's 1,200 calls a year for a single sector head. Multi-strat pods run more. PE deal teams compress the same volume into a 3-4 week diligence sprint per asset.

Try to do 30 expert calls in three weeks at a 7-day cycle each, and the math doesn't work. You can stack them in parallel — but each one still consumes ~5 hours of your own time across briefing, profile review, compliance liaison, scheduling, the call itself, and the writeup. That's 150 hours of analyst time in a 120-hour working window for the sprint.

Something has to give. What gives is either the volume — you do 15 calls instead of 30 — or the quality of the calls you actually get done, because you start accepting the second-best profile to keep the queue moving.

Both outcomes degrade the diligence. Neither shows up on the invoice.

Why smaller teams take the worst of this

The traditional expert network is scaled for the buyer who can absorb the friction.

A multi-billion-dollar fund with 30 sector analysts can run ten parallel calls at any moment. The 7-day cycle stops mattering because the team is the buffer. There's always someone running the next call while three others are queued.

A four-person hedge fund covering 40 tickers cannot do that. Every call competes with every other call for the same analyst's bandwidth. The 7-day cycle isn't a turnaround time — it's a throughput ceiling. You physically can't run 30 calls in three weeks with four people, regardless of budget, because the workflow consumes more of your team's time than the team has to give.

The smaller you are, the harder this hits. Same product, same price, same workflow — but the smaller team can't absorb the operating cost.

How it got like this

The traditional expert network was built as a marketplace and re-engineered into a staffing firm after the 2010-2014 insider-trading prosecutions. Compliance had to be heavy. Sourcing had to be human. Service had to be white-glove because that's what hedge funds and PE sponsors demanded.

So the model became: hire graduates, give them seven calls a week as a hurdle, run every call through a manual relay across briefing, sourcing, compliance, scheduling, and follow-up.

That was a defensible design in 2014. It made sense when the workflow was novel and compliance was unsolved. It is a deeply weird design in 2026, when you can structurally collapse most of that relay into a single workflow and still meet every compliance bar.

But the incumbent model can't collapse it. The cost structure is built around having all those people in seats. Ten associates, four sourcers, three compliance officers, a sales team, a scheduling team, an account manager, a research director — they all need calls flowing through them to justify their role. Compress the workflow and you have to fire people. The PE sponsor won't allow it.

The 7-day cycle is load-bearing.

Why Woozle's model is fundamentally different

We don't run a relay. We run a single workflow. Briefing, sourcing, compliance, scheduling and delivery sit in one team with one set of incentives — get the call done, well, fast, for you.

That changes the cycle dramatically. Most of the 7-day clock at a traditional network is queue time waiting for somebody to pick up a handoff. We've taken most of those handoffs out. Calls land in days, not a week — and when you stack 20 or 30 across a deal sprint, the difference between a 2-day cycle and a 7-day cycle isn't an inconvenience. It's the difference between getting your diligence done and not.

We also don't have a monthly hurdle. Our team doesn't get paid for booking the most calls — they get paid for delivering the right ones to inform your decision. Which means when your brief lands, nobody is triaging it against eleven other briefs to figure out which one closes their hurdle fastest.

Same expert. Same compliance bar. Different workflow.

If you've ever been in week two of a diligence sprint with seven calls scheduled and four still pending profile review — and most of you reading this have — it's not a sourcing problem. It's a workflow problem.

If you want to see how 30 calls in two weeks actually works in practice, get in touch. Happy to walk through a brief side-by-side with whatever your network is quoting you.

Woozle Research, a done-for-you primary research platform used by hedge funds, private equity funds, and capital markets professionals. Get in touch to learn more.