Meet Greg Sutcliffe, managing partner at Meridian Commercial Interiors — twenty-five people who build offices, and six to ten hours of Sunday-night proposal work for every one of them. Every pitch starts from a blank page, and the blank page is where deals go to die.
fictional · illustrative pattern
A tenant fit-out comes in: two floors, forty desks, a café build. Greg has built fifty jobs like it — but every proposal starts from zero, pricing dug out of an estimator's memory, scope rewritten by hand. Two proposals this quarter were late. One of them lost the job.
Run FlowHealth to confirm →Rebuilt from scratch, because 'every job is different.'
The number lives in the estimator's head, the old quote, or the supplier's email — never in one place.
Three partners, three formats. Clients notice when the deck doesn't match the pitch.
The job goes to the firm that was ready Thursday, not the one that shipped Tuesday.
Built once, abandoned after the third job — too rigid for real projects.
Sections reused from past jobs, complete with the wrong client names until caught.
It worked. It was also only on Greg's laptop, and only Greg knew how to drive it.
Custom became a synonym for from-scratch.
He'd seen bad templates and concluded all of them were bad.
The pitch was the fun part; the proposal was the paperwork between him and it.
Eight-hour proposals down to ninety minutes — and the saved time went into the jobs that needed it.
Being fast didn't win every deal. It stopped losing the ones they were right for.
One more won job a quarter, conservatively, from proposals that arrived on time.
The proposal stopped being the weakest part of the pitch.
The fix didn't make proposals cheaper. It made them faster and more honest — which is how Greg found out what the drag had really been costing.
Greg stopped spending Sunday nights rebuilding what he'd already built fifty times. And the partners stopped shipping decks that didn't match the pitch.
40 hours a month back, proposals out in 24 hours instead of four days, and a win rate that stopped leaking to faster firms.
When the machine knew his numbers, custom became fast. Greg stopped conflating craftsmanship with starting over — and the P&L agreed.
— Greg, after the first quarter of on-time proposals
Also common
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