Proposals and scope
Every engagement starts with a similar document written again from scratch: context, problem, approach, scope, timeline, fees, terms. A structured template with client specific fields removes most of the drafting.
Consultants
Your business runs on
the quality of your thinking.
A real part of every week goes to work that requires none of it: proposals, invoices, chasing payment, updating records, writing status reports, booking follow up calls.
At a glance
- Who it fits
- Independent consultants, advisers and fractional executives
- What it removes
- Proposals, reporting, billing and post call admin
- Where it starts
- The Time Leak Audit, from £950 excluding VAT
- Your time
- Under two hours
The problem
This is not a time
management problem.
Independent consultants and advisers build a business on one asset: the quality of their thinking. And yet a real share of every week goes to work that does not need that thinking at all.
It is a systems problem rather than a discipline problem. Most of these tasks are templated, predictable and repeatable, which is exactly what makes them removable. The question is not whether to remove them, but which one to start with.
Most consultants already own the tools. HubSpot or Pipedrive for records, Xero or FreeAgent for billing, Google Workspace or Notion for documents. What is usually missing is that nobody has connected them, and nobody has worked out which process is high enough volume to justify fixing first.
The starting point is always an honest look at how the business actually operates, not a shortlist of tools.
Where the time goes
Where consultants lose
the most time
The pattern is consistent across business development, delivery and billing.
Common candidates for an independent consultant
- Proposal templates with client fields filled in
- Scope documents generated from a structured intake
- Client reporting on a weekly or monthly schedule
- Invoice generation and payment chasing
- Post call records and next action creation
- Onboarding sequences for new clients
- Contract generation with signature collection
- Follow up after business development conversations
- Alerts when a proposal or an invoice goes quiet
- A weekly view of every live and prospective engagement
The arithmetic
What the hours cost you
Six admin hours a week, over a forty eight week year, is 288 hours. At £250 an hour that is £72,000 of expertise applied to work that does not need it.
That figure is arithmetic on an assumed rate and an assumed number of weeks, not a measured result. It is worth running with your own rate, because the number sets a realistic ceiling on what fixing the problem is worth spending.
This works best if you bill at £150 an hour or more, have three or more live client relationships at once, and have tried tools without connecting them into anything that runs. It is a poor fit if you are newly independent and still finding your first clients, or if your work is so bespoke that no two engagements share a process.
≈12 → <1hours of admin in a busy month, at a payroll firm serving around 200 client companies
Premium Paye
Invoicing rebuilt by hand, direct debits keyed one client at a time, paperwork chased by email. Three connected processes took the manual work out of the month.
Read the case studyHow it works
Three paid phases.
You decide after each one.
Each phase has its own deliverables and its own fixed fee, so you always know what you are buying before you buy the next thing.
Time Leak Audit
I map how the work happens today, estimate the hours that could be recovered and rank the opportunities against your goals. Under two hours of your time.
From £950 · fixed fee · excluding VATProcess Design
A working session with your team, then detailed mapping: the steps, the data, the business rules and the exceptions that decide how the build behaves.
Separately scoped · fixed fee · excluding VATImplementation and handover
I build it in the tools you already use, test it against the agreed scenarios, document it and show your team how to run it without me.
Fixed project price · quoted after Process DesignBefore any of it, a free fifteen minute conversation. Bring the process as it actually happens, not as it should.
Before we talk
What consultants ask
before starting.
The honest answers, including the cases where this is not worth your money.
I am one person. Is this overkill?
Not if the hours are real. A solo consultant carries every one of these tasks personally, so there is nobody to absorb them. The Audit is deliberately small enough to be worth doing at that scale.
Do I have to change tools?
I work with the tools you already use rather than replacing them. What automation does need is a connector platform to run the processes, such as Make or Zapier, and any AI steps run on a subscription such as Claude or ChatGPT. These are modest monthly costs, you own the accounts, and I set out exactly what is needed and what it costs in the Audit, so nothing is a surprise later.
What does a fix actually cost?
The Audit is from £950, excluding VAT. Process Design and the build are scoped and priced separately, after the Audit, when there is enough detail to quote honestly. I do not publish a build price, because a number quoted before the mapping would be a guess.
What if my work is too bespoke?
Then you will hear that. If no two engagements share a process, there is nothing repeatable to remove and the Audit will say so. That is a legitimate outcome and it is cheaper to discover at this stage.
Keep reading
Related
Your business
Find out what admin
is costing you.
Tell me what your week actually looks like and I will tell you whether there is a time leak worth fixing, and roughly what it is costing you in a year.
15 minutes · No charge
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