Intake to engagement
Web form to qualified-lead routing to SOW draft to e-signature to project open. Each step gated for review. Kickoff scheduled inside 48 hours of signature.
From $6,5008:1 typical
Vertical · Realization, intake
Close the gap between time worked and time billed.
Consulting firms, agencies, accounting, architecture, design practices. Headcount 5 to 50. The work is real, the hours are billable, and somewhere between intake and invoice 15-25% of realization quietly evaporates. We find where.
The problems
Where the hours go.
Professional services firms sell hours. The hours that don't make it to an invoice are real money. Most firms have 15-25% realization leaking somewhere in the back office.
Problem 01
Intake-to-engagement takes a week.
A prospect signs a proposal, then waits. Engagement letter sits with the partner. SOW gets re-formatted from last quarter's. Kickoff scheduling is a back-and-forth. The first billable hour is two weeks after the handshake.
- Proposal-to-kickoff over 5 days
- SOWs typed from scratch
- Onboarding emails by hand
Problem 02
Time doesn't make it to a timesheet.
Senior people forget. Junior people guess. Time gets entered Friday afternoon for the whole week and the round-down is real money. Realization drops 10-20% on time-not-captured alone.
- Time entered weekly, not daily
- Realization unknown until quarter end
- Round-down rates over 12%
Problem 03
Project profitability is hindsight.
You know a project lost money after it closes. By then the partner who owned it is on the next one, and the lesson goes nowhere. There is no leading indicator.
- Profitability calculated after close
- No mid-project budget burn signal
- Repeat-loss patterns not caught
Quick Wins, professional services
What we ship first.
The most-shipped Quick Wins for professional services operators. Each one is fixed price, fixed date, scoped from the audit.
Realization dashboard
Time worked, billed, collected, written off, by person and project. Refreshed nightly. No more quarter-end mystery. Slack alert on outliers.
From $7,5006:1 typical
Same-day time capture
Calendar integration plus an end-of-day prompt. Time is entered against the right project before the day ends. Cuts the Friday-afternoon guesswork.
From $5,5007:1 typical
Project budget burn alerts
Compare actuals against budget weekly. Alert at 50%, 75%, 90% of budget. Partners get a leading indicator instead of a hindsight.
From $8,5005:1 typical
Client portal
A simple, branded portal for SOWs, deliverables, invoices, and status. Replaces five different email threads per project. Clients feel like grown-ups.
From $9,500Retention, not hours
Proposal automation
Pull from your CRM, your case-study library, and your pricing matrix. Draft a proposal in 20 minutes that used to take 4 hours. Partners review and send.
From $6,5006:1 typical
Real engagement
Raleigh consulting firm: realization from 72% to 89%.
A 14-person strategy consultancy in Raleigh was running 72% realization. Not bad on paper, but the partners felt the leak. Time entry was Friday-afternoon-for-the-week. Two big engagements had lost money in the prior quarter, both noticed after close.
The audit surfaced three Quick Wins: same-day time capture, a realization dashboard, and budget burn alerts. We shipped them in seven weeks combined.
Realization is at 89% this quarter. Partners get a Slack alert when an engagement crosses 75% of budget. Two engagements were re-scoped mid-flight instead of after close. The firm hired a fifteenth consultant on the back of the recovered revenue.
89%
Realization, up from 72%
$340k
Year-one revenue recovered
2 mo
Payback period on the Quick Wins
+1
New senior consultant hired
Professional services Q&A
Questions specific to your floor.
The questions we hear most from professional services operators. For everything else, the general FAQ has more.
Do I have to switch CRMs?
No. We integrate with what you have. HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Karbon, even custom systems. The CRM is rarely the problem; the manual handoffs around it are.
Will AI write my SOWs?
AI drafts the first pass. Partners review, edit, send. The economic case for AI in professional services is the speed, not the substitute.
What's a realistic realization improvement?
5-15 percentage points is typical inside 6 months. The exact lift depends on where the leak is; the audit surfaces that.
My time-tracking tool is fine, do I really need a Quick Win there?
Probably yes. Most firms' time-tracking tool is fine; the behavior around it is the problem. Same-day capture is a behavior change supported by tooling, not a new tool.
Ready for professional services
Find the realization hiding in your back office.
The friction audit walks the timesheet ritual with you. Math on the page in writing. Most firms see 5-15 points of realization in 6 months.