A DAY IN THIS LIFE
The deal Vic lost while writing the deck for the deal before it
Vic · Independent operations consultant for food and ag manufacturers, Denver, Colorado
Vic runs a solo operations practice out of Denver, mostly food processors and ag equipment shops across the Front Range. The billable work is good: walk a plant floor, find the bottleneck, fix the changeover process. The problem is everything after 6pm. In March a discovery call went well, a cheese plant near Greeley, clear budget, clear pain. Then a delivery crunch ate the week and the proposal sat half drafted in a folder called PROPOSALS ACTIVE. Vic sent it on day nine. The prospect had signed with a firm out of Kansas City on day six. Same week: two invoices past sixty days unchased, a workshop deck built on stats Vic could no longer source, and a past client's acquisition announcement that deserved a note and never got one. Vic bills $185 an hour for thinking and spends the evenings typing.
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The switch
A consultant from Vic's peer group mentioned she'd hired an agent. Not software exactly, more like a second employee she briefed once. Vic was skeptical: the practice's whole value is judgment, and no tool drafts judgment. But the first 24 hours were free, so the test was cheap. One mission, deliberately small: here are this afternoon's discovery call notes, a services one pager, two old proposals for voice, and read access to the practice's project drive. Draft the proposal for the packaging line project. Send nothing. Vic hit go at 4:20 and turned back to the delivery crunch, annoyed in advance.
The first mission
16:24, the call notes came back structured: goals, constraints, and a budget signal Vic had half missed, the board had approved capex through Q3. 16:51, the proposal existed: scope, three phases, two pricing options, written in Vic's voice, built on Vic's framework. 17:12, it had gone through the old case studies and slotted in the three relevant ones, the cheese plant story first. 17:31, the contract template was filled and flagged with two clauses to review. 17:40, the mission report: proposal ready, one open question about travel billing, answer in a few words.
The report
Vic read it standing at the kitchen counter, dinner going cold, the dog waiting by the door. The pricing on option two was low. Ten minutes of edits, real thinking, the kind Vic actually bills for. Typed "travel at actuals, then it's ready" and the proposal went out at 8:40 the next morning: day one instead of day nine, before the prospect's other calls had even booked their follow ups. Vic signed up before the walk.
Months later
The proposal mission is routine now. Vic added research sprints before workshops, twelve competitors gridded with sources, delivered between two client sessions. Then RFP watch on the niche, then invoice chasing, the gentle version, so nobody gets an awkward email from Vic personally. Congrats notes go out when a past client hits a trigger event, which is where two of this year's four new engagements came from. The junior analyst Vic had budgeted $70K for never got hired. The pipeline stays warm during delivery crunches, which used to be the exact weeks it went cold. Vic still bills the thinking. The thinking is all Vic sells now.
“The proposal used to take me four evenings. Now it's waiting before dinner and my job is to make it smarter.”
Vic is fictional. The workload is not.
