The Problem
This 15-person firm was growing fast, but their bottleneck was proposals. Each one took a senior partner 4-6 hours to write. They were leaving money on the table — literally turning away potential clients because they couldn't keep up.
They'd looked at hiring another proposal writer. Salary, benefits, onboarding — $80K+ minimum. They decided to try something different first.
What We Did
Discovery (3 days)
We analyzed their last 50 proposals. Turns out, 70% of each proposal was reusable content — company background, methodology descriptions, team bios, standard terms. Only 30% was truly custom.
Nobody had thought to systematize it because "every proposal is different." They're not. Not really.
Implementation (1 week)
We built an AI-powered proposal workflow:
- Content library — organized and tagged all reusable proposal sections
- AI draft generation — given a brief, the system pulls relevant sections and generates a first draft
- Custom section assistance — AI helps draft the unique parts based on prospect research and meeting notes
- Quality review — human review and polish on the AI-generated draft
We trained three team members to run the workflow. Within a week, they were producing first drafts in 45 minutes instead of 4 hours.
The Result
- Proposal output doubled: 3/week to 6/week
- Senior partner time per proposal dropped from 4-6 hours to 1.5 hours
- Win rate stayed the same — the proposals were just as good, just faster
- ROI covered the entire CivSafe engagement in the first month of increased revenue