We rebuilt how we write proposals

We rebuilt how we write proposals last month.

Used to take half a day. Research the client, scope the work, price it, write it, format it. Every time from scratch.

Now it takes about 45 minutes. We feed Claude the discovery call notes and the scope, it produces a structured first draft. A junior person finishes it.

The interesting part isn't the time saving. It's that the quality is more consistent. The proposals that used to vary depending on who wrote them now read the same, which means the ones written by newer staff don't look like they were written by newer staff.

That consistency compounds in ways I didn't anticipate when we started.

The system

The prompt is the hard part. We spent about three weeks iterating on it. The first version produced something that sounded like a generic consultant wrote it. The current version knows our methodology, our terminology, our pricing structure.

The lesson: the time investment is upfront. You build the prompt carefully, you refine it over dozens of uses, and eventually it produces something that's 70% right on the first run. That last 30% is still human work, but it's editing, not writing.

That's a fundamentally different kind of work.