How we automated Thornfield's proposal generation, client onboarding, project reporting, and invoice pipeline — recovering 18 hours of billable time per fee-earner per week and generating £1.1M in additional annual revenue without a single new hire.
Thornfield Consulting had 34 senior consultants billing at £185/hour but averaging 54% utilisation. The gap wasn’t lack of demand — it was 18 hours per week per consultant spent on proposals, onboarding, reports, and invoices.
We deployed five automation pipelines in 16 days. Within 90 days, billable utilisation rose from 54% to 74.6%, proposal turnaround dropped from 4 days to 6 hours, and £1.1M in additional annual revenue was generated without a single new hire.
Thornfield had an exceptional reputation in operations and digital transformation consulting — repeat client rate above 70%, strong referral pipeline, and a senior team that regularly produced genuinely differentiated thinking. Their problem was structural: a firm built on senior expertise was consuming that expertise on administration. The Managing Partner's calculation was straightforward: at £185/hour, recovering 18 hours per consultant per week across 34 people represented £5.7M in recoverable annual revenue — even if only 20% of that time converted to billable work, the return justified any reasonable automation investment.
At 54% utilisation against a 72% target, Thornfield was leaving £2.8M on the table annually. Every hour of administration was an hour not billed. And at £185/hour, every hour mattered.
Each proposal required a senior consultant to research the client, pull relevant case studies from memory and personal drives, draft the methodology, calculate pricing, and format to the firm's template. Quality varied significantly by author. A 4-day process at £185/hour represented £5,920 in unbillable senior time — per proposal. The firm sent 80+ proposals annually. Result: ~£470k/yr in unbillable senior time on proposal writing alone.
New client onboarding depended entirely on the engagement lead's personal process. Some clients received a detailed kickoff pack within 24 hours. Others waited a week for a first call. Project workspaces were set up differently each time. Access provisioning was manual. The inconsistency created a poor first impression that clients — in post-engagement surveys — cited as their primary concern. Result: Onboarding quality correlated directly with client satisfaction at 90 days.
10 active projects each required a weekly status report. Project managers pulled data from Linear, Notion, and email to write a 2-page update. At 2 hours per report, 10 reports per week, 48 weeks: 960 hours annually of project manager time on report writing — equivalent to half an FTE dedicated exclusively to writing documents no client fully read. Result: 960h/yr consumed by reporting · equates to £177,600 in unbilled time.
Time entries were reviewed manually before invoice generation. Approval chains delayed the process. Invoices sent on average 14 days after the period end. Follow-up on late payments was inconsistent — some were chased promptly, others allowed to run 60+ days without contact. Finance team spent 6 hours per week on invoice administration. Result: Average debtor days: 52 · cash flow impact: ~£340k tied up at any time.
Each pipeline targeted one non-billable drain and returned that time to fee-earners. All built to match Thornfield's existing tool stack — no system replacements required.
New brief or discovery call notes trigger the proposal pipeline. Claude AI searches the firm's knowledge base for relevant case studies, extracts the applicable methodology sections, applies Thornfield's pricing model, and produces a structured draft in 45 minutes. Senior consultant reviews and personalises in under an hour.
Signed contract triggers the full onboarding sequence: project workspace created in Notion, kickoff questionnaire sent, calendar invites sent for all milestone calls, access provisioned for all tools, welcome briefing document generated with client context pre-populated.
Every Friday at 4pm, Linear tasks and Notion pages for each active project are read by Claude AI. A structured status report is drafted — completed work, blockers, upcoming milestones, budget consumed — and delivered to the engagement lead for 10-minute review and send.
Approved time entries auto-grouped into invoice line items by project. Draft invoice generated in Xero and sent to engagement lead for one-click approval. Auto-sent to client same day. Payment chaser sequence triggered at day 7, 14, and 21 — politely personalised each time.
All delivered project documents, client feedback, and retrospective notes auto-ingested into a searchable vector knowledge base. Proposal pipeline queries it automatically. Any consultant can search past work by industry, challenge type, or methodology. Institutional knowledge stays in the firm, not in personal drives.
All figures extracted from Harvest time-tracking, Xero, and HubSpot at 90 days. Reviewed with the Managing Partner and Finance Director before publication.
Time tracking analysis across all 34 fee-earners. Non-billable time breakdown by category. Proposal win rate and timing analysis. Knowledge base gap assessment. Three partner interviews.
Five years of project deliverables ingested into Pinecone. Categorised by industry, methodology, and challenge type. Semantic search validated against 50 test queries. Partners approved relevance before proposal pipeline build.
Proposal generation pipeline live day 11 — tested against 3 real active briefs. Senior partners reviewed outputs: quality rated 8.4/10 average, requiring 45 minutes of refinement vs 4 days from scratch. Client onboarding pipeline live day 13.
Status reporting automation connected to all active Linear projects. Invoice pipeline integrated with Harvest and Xero. Knowledge base query interface deployed in Notion. All five pipelines live day 16.
Firm-wide training session. Proposal pipeline used on 12 live briefs in first month — win rate tracked against historical baseline. Monthly prompt refinement based on senior partner feedback. 94% of fee-earners actively using knowledge base by day 60.
45-minute strategy call. We'll audit your ops, identify your top automation wins, and give you the ROI estimate — specific to your stack.
Book Free Strategy Call View PricingI was spending 4 days on every proposal — days I should have been on client work. This Platform built a system that produces a first draft in 45 minutes that's genuinely better than what I was writing from scratch, because it pulls the right case studies automatically. Our win rate on proposals has gone up because we're responding faster and with more relevant evidence.
The invoice automation alone changed our cash flow. We used to run at 52 debtor days. We're now at 24. The polite automated chasers work better than the ones we were sending manually — probably because they're consistent and they go out on exactly the right day, every time.
Whether your problem is onboarding, churn, reporting, or all three — the pattern is the same. Let's audit your ops and build the roadmap.