Professional Services
Echelon Advisory helps small professional services firms, including accounting and bookkeeping practices, law firms, consultancies and agencies, use AI and workflow automation on the work around the work: intake, document chasing, proposals, client updates, time capture and internal reporting. Advice, professional judgment and sign-off stay with your people.
Get Your Free Snapshot. 12 questions. Free. No call required.
Where the office time goes
Every engagement starts with a list of what the client owes you, followed by weeks of reminders to get it.
What automation can do: Send the request list, track what has arrived, sort uploads into the right folders and follow up on what is missing, on a schedule you set.
What stays with your people: Your staff reviews what comes in. Deciding whether it is complete and correct is professional work.
Each new client means pulling pieces from old documents, updating names and terms, and hoping nothing stale slipped through.
What automation can do: Assemble a first draft from your approved templates, your standard language and the client's details.
What stays with your people: A partner or principal sets scope, price and terms, and signs.
Clients want to know where things stand, and answering status questions eats time that could go to the actual work.
What automation can do: Draft routine status updates from your practice or project management system and send them on a schedule you choose.
What stays with your people: Anything substantive, any bad news and any advice is written or approved by a person.
Time gets pieced together on Friday afternoon or at month end, and billing narratives get written from memory.
What automation can do: Suggest time entries from calendar, email and document activity, and draft billing narratives for review.
What stays with your people: The professional approves every entry and narrative before it reaches an invoice.
A new client answers the same questions by phone and email, and then someone re-types the answers into several systems.
What automation can do: Collect intake information once through a structured form, create the client record, and run the checks your firm already requires, such as a conflicts search against your own records.
What stays with your people: Only a lawyer clears a conflict, and only your firm decides whether to take on a client.
Utilization, pipeline and receivables reports get built by hand, so they get built late or not at all.
What automation can do: Pull the numbers from your practice management and accounting systems into a standing weekly report.
What stays with your people: Leadership decides what the numbers mean and what to do about them.
How we work
Free
Answer 12 questions about how your business runs and get a short written brief on where AI could realistically help. No call required.
$2,500
A structured diagnostic of your workflows, tech stack and team readiness that ends in a prioritized plan for where to begin. $1,500 of the fee credits toward implementation.
Hands-on setup of the workflows the plan prioritizes, connected to the systems you already use, with your team onboarded. Quoted per project.
An ongoing advisor who knows your business, keeps an eye on the tools, and helps you decide what to do next, month over month.
Not without checking first. Consumer versions of AI tools can carry different data terms than business plans, and several professions have their own rules. For lawyers, the ABA issued Formal Opinion 512 on generative AI in July 2024, and in Florida there is Florida Bar Ethics Opinion 24-1. For tax preparers, Section 7216 of the Internal Revenue Code limits how tax return information can be used or disclosed. We help you choose tools with those rules in view, but we are not your lawyer or CPA, and the compliance call is yours and your counsel's.
That is not what we build. AI is useful for drafts, summaries and organization, and your professionals stay responsible for anything a client relies on. Every workflow keeps a person reviewing before anything leaves the firm.
No. Smaller firms often feel the admin load most, because the same few people do the client work and the paperwork. The right tools for a small firm are usually simpler than what a large firm buys.
Maybe not. Turning on what you already pay for is often the first recommendation. We look at where the built-in features stop and whether the gap is worth closing.
With the free AI Snapshot: 12 questions about how your firm runs and a short written brief on where AI could realistically help. No call required. If it points somewhere worth going deeper, the $2,500 AI Readiness Assessment turns that into a prioritized plan.
Echelon Advisory is founder-led. Clients work directly with Joe Chastain to identify priorities and scope the next step.
Don't see your industry? The office work we go after shows up in most owner-run businesses. The free Snapshot is the quickest way to find out if it shows up in yours.
Rather talk it through? Tell Joe what you are trying to improve.