A sample built on fictional content. Whitlow Ferris Partners is not a real firm and this reflects no real engagement.
Ermetis
The free assessment
Proposals are where we would start.
Prepared from your intake form and our call on Tuesday. The assessment is free. It is not the diagnosis. It is how we both decide whether the diagnosis is worth doing.
An assessment from one call cannot claim to know your firm, and this one does not try. It works from what you said and marks what we would verify in person.
The arithmetic is yours to check
Where this document puts a number on something, the inputs are shown and you can change them. Nothing here is a measurement, because nothing has been measured yet.
01What we heard
Three things stood out on the call, and all three are about proposals.
Fixed-fee engagements scoped by the other two partners overrun more often than yours, and by more. A proposal starts from whichever past proposal somebody can find, and most of them take the better part of two weeks to get out the door. And a new consultant takes most of a year before running a module alone. The third is about proposals less directly than the first two, because the scoping assumptions and the module structure a new hire has to learn are the same material a proposal is built from, and the proposal is the first place the firm writes down what an engagement will be.
Where the fee is set
On fixed-fee work the fee is set when the proposal goes out. Everything after that is delivering to a number that has already been committed. About two thirds of the firm's revenue is fixed-fee, $6.3M of the $9.4M you described, so a few points of realization on that revenue is a meaningful share of the year's profit. That is why we would look at proposal development before onboarding or the deliverable templates.
02How a proposal gets made
The workflow itself is sound, and everyone runs it the same way.
The problems you described occur between the scoping call and the draft.
The sequence as you described it on the call. The problems are marked in red.
Sequence, not elapsed time
Drawn from the call. We would walk the sequence in person before treating any step as fact.
03Where proposals stand
Whitlow Ferris has three gaps against six practices seen at firms that run proposal development well.
Two of the six practices are already working, and one we could not judge from a call.
Open any practice to see the working version. Anything marked to verify is something we would confirm in person.
Six practices
The practiceAt Whitlow FerrisStanding
Working version: one template is marked as the master, one person owns it, and it carries the date it was last reviewed. Personal copies are fine as scratch space, and no proposal starts from them. The versions themselves are not the problem. The problem is that the better scope-boundary language exists and two of the three partners have never started from it.
Working version: mostly what you already have. The card is reissued each January and everyone knows which one is current. The remaining step is to put it where proposals are written and take the old copy down, so a 2024 rate cannot reach a draft from the library unnoticed.
Working version: the tab says what the firm does now, one person owns it, and each assumption carries the reason it is what it is. A data-readiness week when the company cannot close its books inside ten business days is a rule, and a rule can be written next to the number it changes. This is the gap the next section is about.
Working version: past proposals are tagged by engagement type and sponsor, and for each type there is one recent proposal agreed to be the good example. Finding the right starting point takes a minute. Eleven years of proposals are useful material, and today there is no way to search them by what kind of engagement they were.
Working version: each engagement carries the name of the person who scoped it and the assumptions it was scoped on, and realization is read against both when the engagement closes. BigTime already holds the hours and the fee, so this is one field added at the proposal stage. You are closer to this than to the three gaps.
Working version: each repeat sponsor has a short record of how it wants a proposal and a readout structured and which figures its deal team reads first, kept by the partner who owns the relationship and updated after each engagement.
These are practices we see at professional services firms. There is no published standard behind them. The yellow mark is the gap the next paragraph is about.
The difference in realization mostly comes back to the third gap. The rate card and the assumptions tab give every partner the same starting numbers, but the fee that goes out depends on the adjustments made on top of them: whether the sponsor is a repeat client, whether the portfolio company closes its books inside ten days, whether the engagement lands before or after the close, and how likely a founder-led company is to widen the scope once the team is on site. By your account those adjustments are sound and mostly consistent, and today they are applied only on the proposals you scope yourself. Two partners can scope similar diagnostics and come out at different realization, which matches what you have been seeing in BigTime.
04What it could be worth
Nobody knows the size of it yet, including us.
Any assessment that put a number on your realization after one call would be making it up. What we can do is give you the arithmetic and the two figures it turns on, so you can put your own numbers in and see the answer move. Both figures below are placeholders, and the diagnosis is what replaces them with measurements.
What a realization gap across a year of fixed-fee work is worth.
Fixed-fee revenue scoped by the other partners
Realization gap
$120,000
A year of standard-rate value worked and not recovered, at the gap you selected
7%
Of a pretax income of about $1.7M
$10,000
A month
Pretax income of about $1.7M is eighteen percent of $9.4M, the margin and the revenue you gave us on the call. It stands in until we have the actual figure. The first input is the fixed-fee revenue scoped by partners other than the one whose engagements realize best, a few million dollars, which BigTime can report in an afternoon. The second is the gap in realization between them on comparable engagements, a few points, which has not been measured at all and is exactly what the diagnosis would settle.
The time proposals take is a separate cost and is not in this arithmetic. The diagnosis captures a baseline for the three measures on the last sheet before anything changes, so whatever gets built later is judged in your own numbers.
05This month
Three things worth doing, none of which need AI or need us.
Each of these is worth doing whatever you decide about the diagnosis, and the diagnosis goes faster if they are already done.
Name the master proposal template.Decide which of the three versions is current, mark it, and make the other two read-only. The scope-boundary language in your own copy is worth merging first, and the principal still on v6 should be asked what v6 does that v7 does not.
Put the current rate card where proposals are written.RC-2026 belongs in the Proposals library next to the template, and the 2024 copy comes down. The January email is fine as the announcement. It is not a good place to keep the card.
Log realization by engagement and by who scoped it.On every proposal from now on, record who scoped it and whether it was scoped from the assumptions tab or adjusted, and read realization against that when the engagement closes. BigTime already holds the hours and the fee. A few months of this puts a number on the difference between partners.
06The diagnosis
Two to three weeks inside proposal development, scoped and agreed up front.
We sit with the partners through live proposals: the request, the scoping call, the workbook, the template, the adjustments, the SOW, the send. We inventory what the workflow runs on, including what already works well, and we work out task by task where each task is handled best. Some of what we recommend may have no AI in it at all. And we capture three baseline measures before anything changes: realization by engagement and by partner on comparable engagements, hours per proposal and where they go, and turnaround against the date the sponsor asked for.
What it asks of you: each of the three partners roughly four to six hours across the window, the engagement managers who help on proposals about the same between them, and two hours with Carla Stimson for the BigTime and proposal records. Real access, and candor about how proposals get written today. One position is fixed before anything starts: scoping judgment, pricing, and approval of every proposal stay with the partners.
The deliverable is a written map: proposal development as it runs today, the same workflow with each task in the right hands, what has to be in place for that to work, the baseline numbers, and a recommendation with a specific scope and outcome for a first build. The map belongs to Whitlow Ferris whether or not we go further.
You told us the firm is profitable and growing, and nothing in this document says otherwise. The diagnosis measures whether the difference in realization between partners is a number worth recovering.
The decision
Agree the scope of the diagnosis, or stop here. If the diagnosis runs, its own end is a gate too: agree a first build and its outcome, or stop with the map. Nothing about this commits you to more than the step you are agreeing to.