What a custom agent looks like inside a professional consulting practice — the ten roles in your language, and what each plugs into in a firm running a CRM, a project system and time tracking.
last reviewed
A consulting firm sells the time of people who are expensive, which means every hour those people spend on administration is the most costly overhead in the business. Proposals get written from scratch. Time gets reconstructed on Friday. Deliverables get assembled from prior work nobody can find. Knowledge from a finished engagement leaves when the consultant does. None of that is the work clients pay for, and all of it lands on the people whose hours are worth the most.
The honest version of "does it integrate with my software." These are the systems this industry actually runs on, and what each one means for a build.
HubSpot, Salesforce or a lighter tool. Holds the pipeline and, when maintained, the history of what was discussed — which is exactly what proposal drafting needs.
Where engagements, staffing and budgets live. The system that determines whether you can say yes to work starting in March.
The number everything depends on, entered least reliably. Anything that captures time passively changes firm economics more than any other single change.
SharePoint, Google Drive or a document system holding every deliverable the firm has produced. The most valuable and least accessible asset in most practices.
Statements of work, master agreements and e-signature. Where deals slow down for reasons that have nothing to do with the client's interest.
Client-billable expenses which, when not captured promptly, simply do not get billed.
Where the substance happens and where the record usually does not get made.
Each of these is a real build, not a feature of a product you already pay for. Follow one through to see how it works in general.
Nothing you are owed gets dropped.
Whatever arrives, in whatever format, becomes a clean record.
Writes the recurring document from your own past work.
Knows what expires, renews or comes due — and says so first.
Answers from your own records, not from the internet.
The conversation becomes the record, without anyone typing it up.
Assembles the recurring report from systems that do not talk.
Matches two sets of records and queues only the exceptions.
Two systems that do not talk, now talking.
Applies your rules, escalates only what needs judgment.
If that is a job in your business, the next step is half an hour on a call. Bring whatever you know about the volume — how many a month, who owns it now, which systems it touches. That is enough to scope it properly and quote it flat before anything starts.
Everything in this library is built to order rather than bought off a shelf — and whatever I build, I host and maintain. The rest of the library is here.