An enquiry needed a call, a site visit, a fee proposal and a stage schedule before any drawing started, and the director wrote every proposal himself at the weekend. Once a project was live, the stage invoices followed the RIBA stages for a year and went out when someone noticed a stage had finished. The practice wanted enquiries answered the same day, proposals out within one, and invoices on the day a stage completed.
Three things kept going wrong, and each cost the business time, money or a customer.
Three agents built on the practice's project system and its own fee proposal template, with a director approving every proposal before it goes and the agents doing the drafting, booking and invoicing around them.
The project system held every project and stage; the fee schedule was a spreadsheet the directors had refined over years, and that became the proposal agent's pricing logic. For the first fortnight the directors read every draft proposal and changed roughly a third of them, mostly adding a paragraph specific to the site. By the third week they were adding a sentence. The billing agent raised its first invoice on day nine, for a Stage 3 sign-off, and it was paid within the week.
Enquiries are answered the same hour and site visits booked the same day. Fee proposals go out within a day of the visit, with a director's edits, rather than ten days later from the kitchen table, and the practice wins more of them because it is first. Stage invoices leave on the day the stage completes, and cash arrives two weeks sooner across the year. The directors have their weekends.
'I wrote every proposal on a Sunday. Now it's drafted before I've driven back from the site, and I add the bit only I could know.'
Director
A renovation is months of admin run from a phone on a scaffold: enquiries to answer, site visits to arrange, a stage invoice to raise when the roof goes on, kitchens and windows to chase before the day they are needed. The owner did it in the van at lunch and the evenings, and stage invoices went out a week late because he forgot. He wanted the admin done by the time he got home.
New enquiries sat in a shared inbox until someone had a gap, often two days. Prospective clients had usually instructed another firm by then. They wanted every enquiry qualified and booked the same day.
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