Pilot starts after site access is signed

6 weeks was enough to tell me our first pilot was fake progress. We had a signed pilot LOI, but no site walk date, no meter access, and no owner on the customer side. I use a 1-page pilot gate now: named site lead, data access in writing, shutdown window, and who pays for install labor. If any one of those is missing, it is not a pilot, it is a warm email. The change that mattered: I stopped asking engineering to spec hardware before the site checklist was complete. On the last deployment, that cut our back-and-forth from 11 email threads to 2. I’m also done with “we’ll sort permits later.” If permits are on the critical path, I want them on the first page, not buried in a follow-up.