Firms preparing for a new supervisory relationship typically focus their preparation on substantive content — the numbers, the policies, the specific answers to anticipated questions. In my experience supporting firms through these transitions, supervisors form a durable impression in the first meeting that has as much to do with how the firm handles uncertainty as with the specific answers given.
A firm that responds to a question it can't fully answer by acknowledging the gap directly, and describing specifically how it will follow up, reads very differently to a supervisor than a firm that improvises a confident-sounding answer to paper over the same gap. Supervisors meet many firms and develop a practiced sense for the difference — and the second pattern, once noticed, colours how subsequent answers get received, even when those answers are accurate.
This first impression compounds. Once a supervisor has formed a view that a firm tends to project confidence beyond what its actual knowledge supports, subsequent meetings get approached with more scepticism, and firms find themselves working harder to establish credibility on points that shouldn't have needed extra work.
The firms I've prepared most successfully for new supervisory relationships spend real preparation time not on rehearsing answers, but on identifying, honestly, which areas are genuinely uncertain — and preparing a specific, credible plan for closing that uncertainty, rather than hoping the question doesn't come up.
Supervisors decide what they think of a firm largely in that first meeting, and what they're evaluating isn't just technical competence. It's whether the firm can be trusted to tell them the truth about what it doesn't yet know.