average billable utilisation across professional services firms, the lowest in five years, so every non-billable hour hurts more
SPI Research 2025 Professional Services Maturity Benchmark (403 firms)spent responding to a single RFP, and management consulting is now the number-one industry for proposal volume
Loopio 2026 RFP Response Trends and Benchmarks Report (1,500+ teams)We build a proposal generator that drafts from the discovery notes, your methodology and your past wins, pulling scope and pricing into a near-final doc. You edit rather than write from a blank page. Pitches go out in hours, not days.
We build a reporting flow that gathers each engagement's numbers, writes the commentary in your voice and assembles the branded deck. Your team reviews and sends instead of building from scratch. The monthly fire drill goes away.
We capture the call or email thread, write the summary, pull out next steps and update the right CRM fields automatically. The record stays current without anyone typing it up after a meeting. You can trust the forecast again.
We build a follow-up engine that watches your CRM for stalled leads and untouched enquiries, then drafts the next message for one-click send. The low-risk nudges go on their own. The pipeline keeps moving without the founder in the middle.
We build the AI capability you can put your name on and advise on as a service. You get a working thing the client can see, not a Saturday prompt experiment. The firm stops losing the AI conversation.
You do not automate everything at once. You start where the time is worst and the payback is clearest. In a management consultancie, that order tends to look like this.
Start here. It is the biggest single time sink and the easiest to measure. A single RFP can run to 33 hours, and almost all of it is assembling scope, pricing and past wins, not the thinking a client pays for. We build a generator that drafts from your discovery notes and methodology, so a pitch starts at eighty percent instead of a blank page. The hours go straight back to billable work, and the founder stops writing proposals at eleven at night.
The monthly fire drill, and the best recurring win. Pulling numbers, writing commentary and formatting slides can eat the last week of every month, and none of it is billable. We build a flow that gathers each engagement's numbers, writes the commentary in your firm's voice and assembles the branded deck, so the team reviews and sends instead of building from scratch. Because it repeats every month, the time you save compounds.
Cheap to build, high payoff in trust. After every call, the summary, the next steps and the right CRM fields update themselves, so the pipeline you forecast from stops being half-fiction. Nobody loses an hour a day typing up meetings, and the partner stops being the only person who knows where a deal actually stands. Do this once the proposal and reporting wins are banked.
Plenty of the work should stay human. If a tool promises to take this off you, close the tab.
The diagnosis, the recommendation and the read on a client's politics. This is the work a client actually pays for, and it is exactly what AI is worst at. We automate the work around the thinking, never the thinking itself.
The trust that wins the renewal and the referral. A partner's relationship with a client is not a workflow. We take the admin off it so there is more time for it, but the call, the lunch and the hard conversation stay human.
If your team cannot quickly sanity-check the output, it does not go live. A proposal draft you skim in ten minutes is a win. A number you cannot trace and cannot defend in front of a client is a liability. We build the human review in, not as an afterthought.
Three ways management consultancies try to fix this. Here is what each one actually does.
| Off-the-shelf AI | An in-house hire | A Nifty build | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it is | A general tool your team prompts by hand. | A full-time AI or ops person on the payroll. | Automation built into the tools you already use. |
| What it costs | Cheap per seat. The real cost is the hours spent steering it. | £80k to £120k a year, plus ramp and management. | Fixed scope from £4,000. You own it. |
| Time to value | Instant, but shallow. | Six months to ramp. | Two to four weeks. |
| What it changes | Helps one person work faster. The process stays the same. | A lot, eventually, if you keep them busy. | How the work runs, not just how fast one person types. |
| Who runs it | Each person, every time. | Them, until they leave. | It runs itself. You keep it, we keep it sharp. |
We are new, so this is the shape of a typical build, not a client we are dressing up. It is the pattern we build against in a consultancy, end to end.
A twelve-person strategy consultancy. Two partners, a handful of consultants, an office manager. Growing on referrals, but the partners write every proposal themselves and the reporting eats the last week of every month.
A new RFP lands and a partner blocks out two evenings to write it from scratch, pulling old decks apart for scope and pricing. The monthly client reports take three days of copying numbers into slides. Utilisation sits in the high sixties. Nobody is doing business development, because there is no time left for it.
Two things, built into the tools they already use. A proposal generator that drafts from the discovery notes, the firm's methodology and past wins, so a pitch starts near-final. And a reporting flow that gathers each engagement's numbers, writes the commentary in the firm's voice and assembles the branded deck. Two to four weeks, fixed price, success metric agreed first: hours back and utilisation protected.
Proposals go out in an afternoon instead of across two evenings. The monthly report becomes a review-and-send, not a three-day build. The partners get their evenings back, the hours move to billable work, and the pipeline starts moving again because someone finally has time to work it.
Send us the one workflow eating the most time. Within 48 hours we send back a short walkthrough and a straight answer on what is worth automating.
A fixed-scope build, shipped in two to four weeks. We agree the success metric in writing first, in hours saved or pounds back. Then we build it into your tools.
An optional monthly retainer keeps the work current as your tools and your desk change. You run it. We keep it sharp.
What management consultancies ask before they send us a workflow.