For professional services firms, the phrase ‘time is money’ couldn’t be more apt. It’s why firms are continuously looking to optimize their utilization rates. It’s why billable hours are being scrutinized at a granular level. And it’s why firms should be constantly reviewing the time spent on their proposal submissions.
One part of the process that deserves special attention due to its manual complexity, is that of resume (otherwise known as CV) creation. Resumes and CVs are crucial for winning proposals, but they're also a major time sink. By understanding your expenditure on this process, and finding solutions to optimize it, you can unlock significant benefits for your firm.
In this blog, we'll help you calculate the time (and therefore money) your firm is spending on manual resume tasks so that you can better understand where efficiencies can be gained.
The Costs to Proposal Teams
Team members involved in creating the proposal typically bear the brunt of inefficient resume processes. This might be dedicated bid professionals, wider business development teams, marketers, or a combination of all three. Let's examine the primary time drains:
- Finding your best team Sourcing the unique skill sets that match the bid’s needs can take hours of going back and forth between departments.
- Tailoring individual profiles Personalizing resume content to speak the proposal’s language can be another onerous task.
- Formatting into bid-specific or branded layouts Presenting your team in the right layout can involve many hours of tediously copying and pasting data.
Of these, formatting is typically the most significant time sink. Copying data into bid-specified layouts, especially federal templates like the SF330, can be an enormous drain on resources. Not to mention, it’s a tedious task that no one enjoys!
So, what's this costing your team? The answer depends on several factors:
- Number of proposals produced per year
- Average number of resumes per proposal
- Average salary of bid professionals in your firm
Let's consider the following example:
Assume a firm produces 100 proposals per year, with an average of 20 resumes per proposal. Each resume takes approximately 2 hours to find, tailor, and format for a specific proposal, and the average salary of the bid team working on these is $100,000 a year.
This means:
- Total resumes per year: 100 proposals × 20 resumes = 2,000 resumes
- Total hours spent on resumes: 2,000 resumes × 2 hours = 4,000 hours
- Hourly salary for bid professionals: $100,000 / 2,080 working hours per year = $48.08 p/h
- Total cost of process: 4,000 hours × $48.08 = $192,320 per year
This is a significant sum, but the costs don’t stop there…
The Costs to Consultants
While the burden on proposal teams is clear, there's a more subtle time drain affecting your project teams (ie. your consultants, engineers, contractors, etc). Each time a project member completes an assignment, they need to update their resumes with new experiences, skills, and/or accreditations they’ve earned.
As anyone who updates their personal resume knows, this process isn't as simple as it seems. Not only do you have to write up your latest achievement, but you also have to reorganize previous experiences, potentially remove outdated information, and ensure the new content fits while maintaining the document’s formatting. These formatting adjustments can easily take 30 minutes to an hour each time, and over the course of a year, this can accumulate.
Again, let’s consider how this is impacting your firm. The factors you should take into account are:
- Number of billable project team members
- Number of projects they work on, per year on average
- Average hourly billable cost, per project team member
Once again, an example can help bring this to life. Assume a firm has 500 consultants, each working on an average of 4 projects per year. If each consultant spends 30 minutes updating their resume after each project, and their billable rate is $100 per hour:
- Total hours spent: 500 consultants × 30 mins x 4 projects = 1,000 hours
- Total cost: 1,000 hours × $100 per hour = $100,000 per year
This means the firm is losing $100,000 in billable time annually due to resume updates.
Calculating Your Wastage
In the examples above, the combined cost of inefficient resume processes amounts to $292,320 per year ($192,320 for proposal teams + $100,000 for consultants), but your firm's specific costs will of course differ.
To help you more accurately assess your situation, we've built a calculator where you can input your data and determine an estimated cost of your resume processes.
How Flowcase Can Help
Flowcase is a proposal automation tool that streamlines the most time-consuming tasks around resume management.
By simplifying resume updates, eliminating manual formatting, and improving tailoring workflows, the tool can significantly cut down the time and money wasted on resume processes. This gives your bid teams time back to either focus on other high-scoring parts of the proposal submission, or to deliver more bids.
Book a demo with Flowcase today and discover how we can transform your approach to resume and case study management.
