The most useful first message tells us four things: where the site is, how exposed it is, whether there is an existing basin, and the date it has to be running. Drawings can follow. That is enough for us to tell you whether we are the right studio for the job, which is the only question worth answering in the first week.
Our smallest new-build project in the last three years was £180,000 and our largest was £4.2m. If the budget is well below that range we will usually know a smaller practice who should have the work, and we would rather say so than take a fee for finding out slowly.