- Captures the referral source by name“We appreciate the referral from Mr. Sullivan.”
- Opens with discovery, not a form field“What's prompting you to look into financial planning right now?”
- Follows the answer into scope“Is this primarily personal wealth, or do you also have business entities, trusts, or family members you'd want included in the planning?”
Your fee-earners are doing work nobody can bill.
Law, accounting, consulting, staffing and financial advisory firms. The constraint is never demand. It is how much of a senior person's week survives the administration around the work.
The week disappears in places no timesheet records.
Intake that stalls after the win
An engagement is agreed, then sits while forms, documents and system setup crawl through three people. The client's confidence is highest on day one and lowest by day ten.
Billing chased by the people who billed
Invoices go out and follow-up falls to the fee-earner who did the work, so it happens late, inconsistently, or not at all. AR ages for reasons that have nothing to do with the client's ability to pay.
Reports rebuilt by hand every month
Utilization, realization and pipeline assembled from exports the night before a partner meeting, by someone whose time is chargeable.
An inbound referral, qualified and booked before the call ends.
Scripted scenario, recorded end to end. The conversation is written; the handling is what a deployed agent does on a live call.
Four things, running whether or not anyone has a light week.
Client onboarding
Guided intake, document and form collection, conflict and eligibility checks, and status updates from engagement letter to active file.
Collections and AR
Structured follow-up on every invoice, escalation at thresholds you set, and a ledger update after each touch.
Pipeline and lead follow-up
Inbound inquiries qualified and responded to fast, referrals logged, and quiet prospects re-engaged on a cadence.
Reporting and intelligence
Utilization, realization, WIP and pipeline assembled from live systems and delivered on schedule.
The agent carries the volume. Your people carry the judgment.
The agent runs intake, chases the invoice, books the meeting and assembles the report. What it does not do is advise. The judgment a client pays a partner for, the negotiation, the difficult conversation about scope or fees, stays exactly where it is, with more hours available for it.
That is the human in the loop. Not a person supervising every action, which would defeat the point. A person handling the small share of work where being human is the whole value: the conversation that closes, the client who is upset, the call that needs someone to read the room. How it works in detail.
The advantage goes to whoever moves first.
Firms competing with you are deciding this year whether to add headcount or add capacity. The one that adds capacity carries a larger book on the same team, prices from a known cost base, and does it while the other is still recruiting. That gap compounds every quarter it goes unaddressed.
Name the process eating your billable week.
One discovery call is enough to size what automating it would return.