Industry
Professional services
Your firm's best asset is eleven years of past work nobody can find.
Where we stand
In a practice of 35 to 75 people, the expensive hours are not the billable ones — they are the senior hours spent reconstructing something the firm already knows. Proposals get written from last week's near-miss because the genuinely better precedent is on a file server organised by whoever saved it. Compliance evidence gets assembled from screenshots because the authoritative record is a spreadsheet maintained by hand. Both problems are retrieval problems wearing different clothes, and both are solvable without changing how anyone does the actual work. We will not build you a system that writes advice; we will build one that finds what you already decided and cites where it found it.
Three problems we see repeatedly
Not an exhaustive list of what can go wrong — the three we see over and over, with what they cost and the shape of the fix.
A proposal takes a partner six to nine hours, almost all of it finding and adapting a similar past one from memory.
What it costs: Senior time at the highest rate in the firm, spent on search — and the same three recent projects cited regardless of fit.
The fix: Index the back catalogue by what predicts relevance, retrieve with provenance, and draft with every commitment field left blank for a human.
Access grants and approvals live in a spreadsheet that everyone knows is wrong.
What it costs: About three weeks of a senior manager per evidence pack, and an authoritative record the firm has quietly stopped trusting.
The fix: Move grants into rows with an approver, a reason and an expiry, and write the audit trail at the database so no code path can skip it.
Client onboarding repeats the same document chase every time, slightly differently.
What it costs: Weeks of elapsed time before billable work starts, and an inconsistent file that surfaces at the next review.
The fix: One structured intake per engagement type, with the chase automated and the exceptions the only thing a person sees.
Not yet published
We publish a vertical once two client stories stand behind it. This one has fewer, so it is listed honestly rather than dressed up.
We work in professional services but we will not claim depth here yet. An empty vertical advertising itself as a speciality is worse than an absent one, so this hub stays out of the main navigation until the proof exists.
What we have done so far:
Proposals that stopped eating the fee-earners' evenings
A consultancy assembled proposals from its own past work instead of from last week's near-miss document.
6-9 hrs → 90 min design target for a first proposal draft
72 staffA security review answered in an afternoon
An accountancy practice stopped losing three weeks per client to evidence-gathering by making the trail a by-product of the work.
4 hours target time to answer a 90-question security review
You can still scope work with us. You will be told exactly which parts have precedent behind them and which would be a first.
Scope professional services work
Tell us what is slow and what it is costing. You get the arc it belongs to, a published price band, and the closest story we have — or a straight answer that we do not have one.
Scope practice work with us