A sample built on fictional content. Whitlow Ferris Partners is not a real firm and this reflects no real engagement.
Whitlow Ferris Partners is a fictional management consulting firm working for private-equity portfolio companies. It runs Microsoft 365, BigTime for time and billing, HubSpot for the pipeline, and QuickBooks Online for the books, and its method and its positions on scoping and fees have been organized and approved. The drafter works inside those systems. Each step below is the screen a real person would be looking at.
The diagnosis measured this workflow. On 21 comparable five-week diagnostics, realization ran 97, 93, and 84 percent across the three partners, a 13-point spread. The gap is $268,000 a year of standard-rate value the firm worked and did not recover, and $140,000 to $190,000 of that looks recoverable in the first twelve months. About thirty percent of proposal time went to finding comparable past proposals and case examples and confirming which rates and scoping assumptions were current.
Hi Marcus. We’re closing Coastal Fleet Services in the next few weeks. It’s a fleet maintenance roll-up, about $85M, and the back office is still running on the acquired companies’ systems. We’d like a proposal for a 100-day plan, with the finance function and service operations as the priorities.
I’ve attached the two-page deal summary and the management org chart. Can you get it to us by Friday? We’d like to start the week after close.
Thanks,
Megan
Tue 9:10Megan wrote to Marcus, the partner she knows, and copied proposals@. The drafter watches that shared mailbox from inside WFP’s Microsoft 365 tenant. It picked up the request, read the deal summary and the org chart, pulled the Redfield account summary (ACC-REDF) and the two comparable engagements, and started drafting. Nobody at WFP has done anything yet; Ellen has not seen the email.
Tue 11:40The draft never goes to the sponsor. It lands in the channel the partners already watch, two and a half hours after Megan’s email, and the button opens the review page. Ellen picks it up the next morning.
| Fee line | Weeks | Amount | Source, click to open |
|---|---|---|---|
| Engagement partner, Marcus Delgado, two days a week | 2 | $64,000 | |
| Principal, Greg Hollis, finance-function workstream, two days a week | 2 | $48,000 | |
| Engagement manager | 5 | $90,000 | |
| Senior consultant | 5 | $70,000 | |
| Consultant | 5 | $55,000 | |
| Second consultant, weeks three to five | 3 | $33,000 | |
| Fixed fee · five weeks · no discount, new sponsor | 22 | $360,000 |
Tue 11:40This is the page the Teams button opens, on WFP’s own SharePoint. Any source opens with a click and shows where a fee line or a scope sentence came from. Nothing goes to Redfield from this screen; the draft waits for a partner.
Greg Hollis one week ($24,000) and the senior consultant one week ($14,000), $38,000, added as its own fee line ahead of the five weeks of plan design. Her reason, saved with the line: “Coastal Fleet closes in eighteen days and three of the branches are still on the acquired companies’ ledgers. The finance baseline won’t hold if we start before the data is clean, and that’s where the overruns have come from.” New total $398,000; the rates re-ran against RC-2026 on save.
The PT-7 sentence replaced with her own: “The plan names each initiative, its owner, and its first-hundred-day milestones. Delivery of the initiatives, interim roles, and PMO support are scoped separately, at the sponsor’s request, once the plan is approved.” This was the v7-EM language from her OneDrive copy; it is saved to PT-7 as the approved template language. Ellen owns PT-7, so the edit saves directly; the same edit from another partner would have queued to her.
Wed 8:30Same page, Ellen’s half of it. She adds the week, tightens one sentence, decides the two flags, and approves. The software drafted and the partner decided.
This statement of work accompanies the proposal deck of the same date, which names the team. Whitlow Ferris Partners would design the 100-day plan for Coastal Fleet Services across three workstreams, integration governance, the finance function, and service-operations throughput, and present it to the Redfield deal team at the end of week six.
| Data-readiness week | $38,000 |
| 100-day plan design, five weeks | $360,000 |
| Total fixed fee · travel and expenses billed at cost · valid for thirty days | $398,000 |
Wed 9:15This is what Megan receives: the proposal deck and the SOW, filled from the templates the firm already uses, sent by Marcus Delgado, who holds the relationship. The citations, the flags, and the log stay on WFP’s side.
This is the whole machine. Four places the firm’s knowledge already lives, one piece of software inside the tenant, checks that are code, a partner with the last word, and edits that flow back in.
The draft was ready two and a half hours after Megan’s email. Ellen’s review the next morning took about twenty minutes, most of it on the data-readiness decision, and the proposal went out on Wednesday against a Friday ask. Before the drafter, the firm’s median was fourteen hours of partner and manager time per proposal and five and a half business days from the request to the proposal out.
At a law firm, this is the engagement letter drafted from the approved rate schedule and comparable past matters. At an accounting firm, it is the advisory proposal drafted from the fee schedule and the last few engagements of the same kind. The pattern is the same: drafted from what the firm has already approved, every figure showing its source, a partner approving.