Solo consulting runs on relationships, proposals, and billable time. Strkr ships a CRM shaped around proposals, engagements, and utilization with AI drafting in your voice and the flexibility to grow if you ever bring on help.
A solo consultant runs a different motion than a traditional business. There is no team to delegate to, no admin to run the pipeline review, no sales ops to build the forecast. The consultant is also the admin, the salesperson, the deliverer, and the AR clerk. The CRM has to add leverage without adding admin burden. The pain points below are what Strkr onboarding hears from independent advisors, boutique experts, and fractional operators (fractional CFO, CTO, CMO, CRO).
Many solo consultants track the pipeline in a paper notebook, a Notes app, or a weekly email to self. The missed follow-up at week 11 kills the deal. Strkr's pipeline view shows every active opportunity with a next-step prompt and automated nudges so no follow-up falls through.
A solo consultant sends 20 to 60 proposals per year. Each one gets built from scratch in Word with the consultant cannibalizing a prior proposal and tuning the scope. Four hours per proposal is typical. Strkr's proposal workflow pulls from the consultant's content library with AI drafting of the scope paragraph in the consultant's voice. Time drops to 45 minutes.
Solo consultants live on billable hours and realization rate. The timesheet (Toggl, Harvest, Clockify) tracks the hours. The consultant usually does not know whether they are hitting the 72 percent utilization target until the quarterly tax bill arrives. Strkr pulls time-tracking through the webhook spec and surfaces utilization on the dashboard with weekly trend.
Solo consultants chase invoices inconsistently. A 60-day aged invoice costs the consultant three to five weekends of cash flow. Strkr's AR tracking shows invoice status (sent, viewed, paid, past due) with automated reminder cadence at days 7, 14, and 21 past due. The AI drafts the reminder in a professional tone.
A past client who had a good engagement is five times more likely to buy a second engagement than a cold prospect. Solo consultants rarely cross-sell systematically because they do not have the time to run a nurture cadence. Strkr fires an AI-drafted re-engagement outreach at 90, 180, and 365 days post last engagement.
Most AI drafting features sound like a chatbot: generic phrasing, weak specifics, obvious filler. For a solo consultant whose voice is the brand, generic AI is worse than no AI. Strkr AI learns the consultant's tone from the first 20 approved drafts and lands in a voice that feels like the consultant wrote it.
Strkr ships a tunable solo consultant schema with Client, Opportunity, Proposal, Engagement, and Content Library as first-class objects. The consultant can rename or extend anything. The default is close to where most solo practices eventually settle.
A client carries industry, size, relationship phase (prospect, nurture, qualified, active, past, strategic), primary stakeholder, and relationship history. The relationship phase drives touchpoint cadence and AI retrieval scope for drafting.
An opportunity ties to a client and carries scope (what services, what deliverables), decision timing, procurement path, decision criteria, and competition. The opportunity drives the proposal workflow and the forecast.
A proposal ties to an opportunity and carries scope paragraph (AI-drafted in the consultant voice), pricing structure (fixed, hourly, value-based, retainer), timeline, and revision history. The proposal pulls from the content library.
An engagement ties to a client and defines scope, budget (hours and dollars), timeline, and delivery status. The engagement pulls time-tracking data through the webhook spec and surfaces utilization and realization on the dashboard.
The content library holds reusable proposal content: case studies by industry, methodology blocks, bio and credentials, boilerplate (confidentiality, scope assumptions, timeline), and prior scope paragraphs. The AI retrieval pulls from the library when drafting a new proposal.
Time entries pull from Toggl, Harvest, Clockify, QuickBooks Time, or TSheets through the webhook spec. The engagement card surfaces hours used versus budget, with the 90-day forecast based on the current burn rate.
An invoice generates from the engagement milestones or hours and syncs to QuickBooks, Xero, FreshBooks, or Wave through the standard webhook spec. Payment status (sent, viewed, paid, past due) surfaces on the client card.
A solo consultant's voice is the brand. Strkr AI learns the consultant's tone from the first 20 approved drafts and lands in a voice that feels like the consultant wrote it. The jobs below are what shows up on every solo-consultant deployment inside the first two weeks.
Strkr AI drafts the proposal scope paragraph from the opportunity brief and the content library. The consultant tunes two sentences on average before sending. The draft lands in the consultant's voice because Strkr AI learns the tone from the first 20 approved proposals.
After a discovery call Strkr AI drafts the followup email summarizing the client problem, the proposed engagement thesis, the next steps, and the proposal timeline. The consultant approves and sends in under five minutes instead of rebuilding the context from notes.
For active engagements Strkr AI drafts the weekly status update: work completed, work in flight, open questions, next steps. The consultant reviews and sends in two minutes per client.
For past-due invoices Strkr AI drafts the reminder at days 7, 14, and 21 past due in a professional tone. The consultant reviews and sends. AR aging drops materially on past-due invoices because the chase is consistent.
Strkr AI drafts quarterly nurture outreach to past clients with a relevant point of view, a reference to the past engagement, and no transactional ask. The consultant reviews and sends to a batch of past clients in one pass. Nurture outreach drives the second-engagement conversation.
For past clients hitting the re-engagement trigger (90, 180, 365 days post last engagement) Strkr AI drafts the outreach referencing the past engagement, a new engagement thesis, and an easy next step. Conversion from past-client outreach rises from the industry baseline of 11 percent to the 22 to 32 percent range.
Strkr AI drafts a weekly or biweekly LinkedIn post from the consultant's current engagement patterns, point of view, and content library. The consultant tunes two sentences and posts. The content drives inbound inquiries without the consultant running a dedicated content calendar.
A solo consultant lives on utilization (what percent of your week is billable) and realization (what percent of billed hours get invoiced and collected). Strkr surfaces both on the dashboard with weekly trend and threshold alerting.
The industry utilization target for a solo consultant is 65 to 72 percent (around 26 to 29 billable hours in a 40-hour week). Strkr tracks week-over-week utilization and flags under- or over-utilization. Chronic under-utilization signals pipeline weakness. Chronic over-utilization signals burnout risk.
Realization rate measures invoiced dollars against billable hours at standard rates. A fixed-fee engagement that runs 42 percent over budget has a realization rate below 70 percent. Strkr surfaces per-engagement realization with trend.
The engagement card surfaces hours used, hours remaining, dollars invoiced, dollars uninvoiced, and the burn rate. The consultant sees budget risk 11 days before the engagement runs red instead of at week eight.
For consultants running retainer engagements Strkr's dashboard surfaces monthly recurring revenue, retainer count, and churn-risk retainers. The MRR number is the single clearest signal of practice stability.
AR aging surfaces on the client card and the dashboard. Clients with 60 or 90 day aging get an automated reminder cadence with AI-drafted outreach. Most solo consultants close AR aging under 30 days on 85 to 92 percent of invoices once the cadence is consistent.
Pipeline coverage shows expected revenue in flight versus the next-quarter revenue target. A healthy solo practice runs 2 to 3x coverage at the start of a quarter. Thinner coverage flags a sales push. Richer coverage flags capacity planning.
The capacity view shows the next 10 weeks of booked billable hours per engagement overlaid with pipeline opportunities and their expected close dates. The consultant sees whether a new engagement can start in two weeks or six and schedules the proposal accordingly.
The comparison below is Strkr Starter at $29 per seat versus the typical solo-consultant stack (Notion plus Harvest plus FreshBooks plus a Word template plus LinkedIn).
| Feature | Strkr | Solo-consultant default stack |
|---|---|---|
| Pipeline visibility | Native with next-step prompts. | Notion board, manual updates. |
| Proposal from content library | AI-drafted in consultant voice. | Word template cannibalized each time. |
| Utilization and realization | Native through Harvest integration. | Spreadsheet at quarter end. |
| AR tracking with automated chase | Native with AI-drafted reminders. | FreshBooks reminder, manual tune. |
| Nurture and re-engagement cadence | Workflow with AI-drafted outreach. | LinkedIn DM, inconsistent. |
| Content library for proposals | Case studies, methodology, boilerplate. | Google Drive folder. |
| LinkedIn thought-leadership drafting | AI-drafted from engagement patterns. | Blank cursor and willpower. |
| Capacity-plus-pipeline overlay | Native 10-week forward view. | Mental model only. |
| Mobile app for in-flight updates | Native with offline tolerance. | Mix of apps, no unified view. |
The playbooks below are patterns Strkr's onboarding team sees across solo consultants: independent advisors, boutique experts, fractional operators, and specialty consultants.
A fractional CFO ran six retainer engagements with a mix of monthly and project work. The pipeline lived in a Google Sheet, the proposals lived in Word, and utilization lived in Harvest. Strkr onboarding ran a 7-business-day migration. The retainer stack, utilization dashboard, and AI-drafted monthly client update landed on day one. The CFO reclaimed about 11 hours per week on administrative work.
An independent management consultant sent 40 proposals per year, each one four hours of custom writing. Strkr onboarding configured the content library with 11 case studies, 7 methodology blocks, and 4 bio variations. Strkr AI learned the tone from the first 20 approved proposals. Per-proposal time dropped from 4 hours to 45 minutes. The consultant closed 14 extra engagements in the next 12 months on the time reclaimed.
A boutique executive coach ran 14 monthly coaching retainers at $4,200 per client. The practice depended on retainer stability. Strkr onboarding configured the MRR dashboard with churn-risk retainers surfaced on configurable signals (session cadence, client sentiment, open questions). The coach retained all 14 retainers through year one and added three strategic retainer upgrades.
A fractional CMO focused the practice on 20 target companies as the next pipeline. The relationship arc ran 12 to 24 months of nurture before a conversation. Strkr onboarding configured the relationship-phase model with partner-attention cadence tuned per phase and quarterly thought-leadership drops. The CMO closed four target companies in year one that would have gone cold under the old reactive pattern.
A specialty consultant in healthcare operations ran a solo practice for three years with a growing waitlist. The decision to bring on a second consultant and an operations manager was the next step. Strkr handled the second-team expansion in the admin console without a migration: role scoping, data visibility, separate engagement ownership. The practice scaled from one to three seats on Pro without a schema change.
Book a 30 minute call. We will walk through the proposal workflow, the utilization dashboard, and the AI drafting with your actual practice focus.
The real question is what the consultant's time is worth. A solo consultant at a $240 per hour billable rate who reclaims 11 hours per week on administrative work (pipeline tracking, proposal writing, AR chase) gets back about $2,640 per week in opportunity cost. The $29 per seat and $49 AI add-on investment is $78 per month, which pays back in under 90 minutes of reclaimed billable time per month. The math works even on conservative assumptions.
Strkr AI learns tone from the first 20 approved drafts through a tenant-scoped style profile. The style profile captures voice patterns (sentence length, formality, hedging, specific vocabulary) without storing client-specific content. The retrieval scope for AI drafting is strictly bounded to the client and the engagement. Cross-client retrieval is disabled by default. The style profile and the retrieval scope are independent.
Strkr handles the expansion in the admin console. Add seats on the same plan or upgrade to Pro for the team features (quarterly checkpoint, priority support, 1,000 workflow runs per month). Role scoping, data visibility, and separate engagement ownership all configure in the admin console. No migration, no restructure. The practice scales from one to three to ten seats without a schema change.
Yes. Strkr integrates with Toggl, Harvest, Clockify, QuickBooks Time, and TSheets for time tracking through the standard webhook spec with HMAC signing. For invoicing Strkr integrates with QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks Desktop (through QBD Connector), Xero, FreshBooks, and Wave. Line items, hours, and invoice status carry through. The invoice status surfaces on the client card for AR tracking.
Honeybook, Dubsado, and Bonsai focus heavily on creative-service workflows (bookings, scheduling, client portals). Moxie focuses on freelancer-oriented features. Strkr focuses on consulting-practice workflow (pipeline, proposals, engagements, utilization, nurture). The feature overlap is 30 to 50 percent. For a creative service business (photography, event planning, design) Honeybook or Dubsado is a cleaner match. For a consulting practice Strkr is the fit.
Strkr's import brings in the full client history, email history, proposal history, and engagement history with original timestamps preserved. For proposals and engagement letters stored as PDFs in a document management system Strkr's attachment import brings the files in with their original paths. The AI retrieval index sees the full history on day one, which means the first proposal Strkr AI drafts is grounded in your actual practice, not a stub.
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