Proposal turnaround takes weeks
Discovery to delivered proposal averages 7–14 days in shops your size. Warm clients cool. Some go silent. Faster competitors close them.
Managed AI for AV integrators
Cut your proposal turnaround from two weeks to one afternoon.
We develop custom proposal automation systems specific to your business, using your D-Tools library (or whichever system you use), your CEDIA standards — plus we provide a dedicated AI consultant for your team to help you continue to automate your sales process.
One integrator per market area.
Built for shops doing $1M+ residential and commercial projects
What changes
The same proposal, two timelines.
TodayWith this in place
Proposal turnaround
2 weeks
An afternoon
Internal revisions
3–5
0–1
Designer wait time
4–7 days
Same day
Days to signature
21+
3–5
Industry-benchmark ranges. Your numbers are likely both better and worse — that's what the calculator is for.
The problem
The expensive mistakes happen in proposal-land, not the installation.
The places integrators bleed money aren't at the rack. They're at the proposal — slow, manual, and gated by a handful of senior people.
Revision cycles compound costs
Three internal review passes before the client sees v1. Each pass costs senior staff time and adds noise that obscures what the client actually asked for.
Designer queue bottleneck
A single CAD/visualization designer gates the whole pipeline. They're stuck building rack elevations and room diagrams 70% of which are the same as last month's project.
The offer
Two things, working together.
A custom internal app plus a dedicated AI consultant — not a SaaS subscription, not a one-off project. A managed service.
Part one
A custom proposal tool
Built around your packages, your library, your house style. Connects to D-Tools, your CRM, your design assets. Your code, your repo, your IP.
Part two
A dedicated AI consultant
A senior consultant embedded with your team — not a vendor hotline. We use the tool together on real proposals you're shipping that week, and tune it as your workflow evolves.
Phases
The end-to-end pipeline we build for you.
- 01
Intake engine
Structured discovery that captures scope once and propagates it everywhere.
- 02
AI product selection
Bill-of-materials drafted from your library, your standards, your margins.
- 03
D-Tools integration
Your library, your packages, your way — automated.
- 04
Schematic brief generation
Rack elevations, SC schematics, room diagrams — drafted not from scratch.
- 05
Conflict detection
Power, network, license, and compatibility checks before the proposal ships.
- 06
Proposal output
Branded, walkthrough-ready proposals — not 40-page PDFs.
- 07
Post-approval package
Installation, programming, and commissioning docs generated automatically.
ROI Calculator
What is your current proposal process costing you per year?
Six inputs. The math is shown, not hidden. Numbers update as you type — then get the full AV Proposal Audit PDF in your inbox.
Your numbers
Tell us how proposals flow today
All values are estimates — round to the nearest reasonable number. The math below updates as you type.
Across the team, not per person.
Internal passes before the client sees v1.
$/hr
Loaded cost (salary + benefits + overhead).
$/hr
Loaded cost.
$
Won projects, contract value.
%
Of proposals sent, how many close.
How the math works
- blendedHourlyRate
- Senior $/hr × 60% + Designer $/hr × 40% (typical proposal-time mix)
- hoursLostPerMonth
- Proposals/mo × (Revisions + 1) × 2.5 hrs per pass
- annualLaborCost
- Hours/mo × 12 × Blended hourly rate
- projectedSavings
- Annual labor cost × 65% (conservative reduction)
- revenueAtRisk
- Proposals/mo × 12 × Avg project value × Win rate × 12% velocity-loss factor
- costOfDoingNothing
- Annual labor cost + Revenue at risk
Your annual exposure
Cost of doing nothing
Annual — labor + revenue at risk
$1,213,920
Three-year impact: $3,641,760
- Hours per month lost to proposal admin1,440 hrs / year
- 120 hrs
- Annual labor cost of current processBlended rate $87/hr
- $125,280
- Projected savings with a streamlined system65% time reduction, conservative
- $81,432
- Revenue at risk from slow turnaroundDeals lost to faster competitors, est.
- $1,088,640
These figures are estimates based on integrator-industry benchmarks and the inputs you provided. They are intended to size the opportunity, not to forecast a specific engagement's return.
Your next move
Your number is $1,213,920.
The PDF teardown — 9 hidden costs, what each is worth, what good looks like — is yours to download. If the number is meaningful, the 20-minute call is the fastest way to decide if a pilot makes sense.
Why this works
The principle behind the practice.
About
Fifteen years in marketing. Three years in the trenches with AI.
I'm Alejandro Arce. I spent fifteen years running marketing for B2B services companies — agencies, SaaS, professional services. I know what a proposal is supposed to do and where it leaks.
Three years ago I started building with Claude full-time. Now we help companies implement AI into their workflow not only by developing automation systems but also by becoming an extension of your team.
The principle
“We don't replace your tools.
We orchestrate them.”
D-Tools stays D-Tools. Your CRM stays your CRM. The custom app we build sits between them, pulling the right inputs and producing the right outputs — so your team uses the tools they already know, just with the slow parts removed.
What you get
Everything in the box.
Custom proposal tool, tuned to your shop
Built around your packages, your library, your house style.
D-Tools BOM automation
Reads and writes your D-Tools project files directly.
Control system licensing handled automatically
Tells you exactly how many Crestron or Control4 licenses each project needs based on the device list, so you stop eating miscounted licenses.
Power & network budget validation
Continuous checks against the live BOM.
Catches product conflicts before they hit install day
Matrix/display, controller/driver, and DSP/speaker compatibility checked automatically against every project's BOM.
Weekly working session
60–90 minutes, used on real proposals you're shipping this week.
Async support (Slack + Loom)
Same-day response during business hours, recorded videos for anything substantial.
All code in your private repo
Your account, your IP, your continuity if we ever part ways.
Continuous tuning
As your packages evolve, the tool also evolves.
Quarterly business review
What's working, what's not, what we ship next quarter.
Questions
The things people ask before the first call.
Will this work with our D-Tools setup?+
Yes. D-Tools is our default integration target — the tool reads from your existing library and writes back complete project files. We respect your packages, your accessories logic, and your accessory rules. If you're running D-Tools SI or D-Tools Cloud, both are supported.
What about Jetbuilt, Q360, or iPoint?+
We can build against any of them — the BOM and proposal logic is the same; only the integration adapter changes. D-Tools is fastest because we have a reference implementation; the others take roughly two additional weeks of setup.
Who owns the code we build together?+
You do. Every line of code lives in a private GitHub repository under your account. The proposal tool, the integrations, the AI prompts — all of it is yours. If you ever decide to part ways, you keep everything and can run it independently.
What happens if I cancel?+
You keep the code, the repo, the deployment access, and the documentation. We hand off the codebase and provide a 30-day transition window for any handover questions. There's no hostage clause; the tool keeps running on your infrastructure.
How long until we have something usable?+
First usable build is in your hands within two weeks — that's the intake engine plus a draft BOM workflow. Full end-to-end (intake through proposal output) is typically 6–8 weeks. We iterate weekly, not quarterly.
How is our team trained?+
Weekly working sessions where we use the tool together on real proposals you're shipping that week. We don't run separate training; the training is the work. Plus a Loom library you can hand to new hires.
Where does our data live?+
On your infrastructure — your Supabase or Postgres, your S3 bucket, your environment. We use the Anthropic API for the AI layer, which is covered by their zero-retention enterprise policy. Your client data is never used for model training.
Why only one integrator per market?+
Because the value of the system compounds with the depth of customization to your specific shop. Working with two integrators in the same metro would mean both get a watered-down version. One-per-market means yours is the only one tuned to your exact workflow, library, and clients.
Two paths
Curious, or ready to talk?
Both end at the same place. Pick the one that fits where you are right now.