The proposal questions you answer before every engagement.

Nothing here needs writing from scratch. These are documents this kind of business keeps anyway, and each one answers a question you are currently answering by hand.

Rate card

Day rate, retainer bands, minimum engagement, and what you charge for a diagnostic versus delivery.

Scope documents

The shapes of work you take on, typical durations, and what a first phase usually involves.

Standard terms

Payment terms, notice periods, IP ownership, and what happens if a project pauses.

Case write-ups

Anonymised accounts of past work — the sector, the problem, the approach.

The email you keep resending

The one explaining how you work, which you have rewritten forty times and never saved anywhere findable.

Real questions in a customer's words, not feature names. Each of these is answerable from the documents above, with the source shown underneath the reply.

• “Do you work with pre-seed companies or only funded ones?
• “What is your minimum engagement?
• “Can you start in January?
• “Do you do fixed-price or day rate?
• “Have you worked in regulated fintech before?

Qualifying is a filtering problem, and filtering is the part of consulting nobody bills for. Half the enquiries that reach an independent consultant are for work below their minimum, in a sector they do not cover, or on a timeline they cannot meet. Finding that out costs two emails and sometimes a call.

Put your rate card and scoping notes in front of the assistant and it does that filtering in the conversation. Someone asking about a two-week engagement when your minimum is six gets told so, with the terms document cited, before either of you has spent anything. Someone who fits gets offered real slots from your Google Calendar and books one.

The gap report is what makes the second month better than the first. Every question the assistant could not answer is logged and grouped by topic, so instead of guessing what to add, you read a list of what prospects keep asking that your documents do not cover. Answer one and your reply becomes knowledge immediately.

• Negotiating. It quotes your published rates from your documents. It will not agree a discount, a payment plan or a variation, and the never-promise controls exist so you can make sure of that.
• Firms with a sales team and a CRM workflow. This captures leads into a record you own and emails you; it is not a pipeline tool and does not pretend to be.
• Anyone unwilling to write anything down. The assistant is exactly as good as the documents behind it, and there is no version of this that works on an empty knowledge base.