Whitmore & Associates

Whitmore & Associates is a management consulting firm based in Chicago that advises mid-market companies on operational strategy, organizational design, and growth transformation. Founded by Rachel Whitmore in 2012, the firm has built a reputation for delivering unusually hands-on, high-touch consulting engagements—the kind where partners and senior consultants are deeply embedded in client organizations, not just delivering slide decks from a distance.

The firm employs 85 people, including 40 consultants who each manage between five and eight client engagements simultaneously. Every one of those relationships depends on clear, timely communication—weekly recap emails, post-meeting summaries, action item tracking, and proactive scheduling. The quality of that communication is a core part of what clients are paying for, and it’s a key differentiator in a crowded consulting market.

Before Intelo, Whitmore ran on Microsoft Outlook for email, Microsoft Teams for internal communication, Google Calendar for scheduling, Excel for tracking, and Salesforce for CRM. The tools worked, but the communication overhead they created was staggering. The firm’s biggest bottleneck was not strategy work—it was the administrative machinery that surrounded it.

The math was punishing. Each consultant managed five to eight active engagements, and each engagement required a polished weekly recap email to the client. These recaps summarized the week’s activities, highlighted key decisions, flagged upcoming milestones, and listed open action items. Writing a good recap took 20 to 30 minutes per engagement. With six engagements on average, that meant consultants were spending two to three hours every Friday afternoon doing nothing but writing emails—time they could have spent on billable strategy work.

But the recaps were just the tip of the iceberg. Consultants also spent significant time drafting post-meeting summaries, scheduling across time zones, tracking commitments made in dozens of overlapping conversations, and preparing for the next week’s calls. The total administrative overhead consumed roughly 30% of each consultant’s work week. For a firm that billed by the hour, that was an enormous hidden cost—both in lost revenue and in consultant burnout.

The firm also struggled with knowledge continuity. When a consultant transitioned off an engagement—whether due to staffing changes, vacation, or project completion—the handoff process was painful. The incoming consultant had to piece together context from scattered email threads, incomplete meeting notes, and verbal debriefs. It typically took a full week to get up to speed, during which the client experienced a noticeable drop in service quality. Rachel Whitmore knew this was unsustainable as the firm grew.

Whitmore & Associates rolled out Intelo to the consulting team in a pilot with eight consultants over three weeks before expanding firm-wide. Ivo was deployed as a communication layer that sat on top of their existing tools—it connected to Outlook, Google Calendar, and Teams, giving it visibility into the full flow of client interaction without requiring anyone to change their workflow.

The first capability that made an impact was automated recap generation. Ivo began tracking every client interaction throughout the week—emails sent and received, meetings held, action items discussed, decisions made—and on Friday mornings, it generated polished draft recap emails for each engagement. The drafts were formatted in the firm’s standard style, included the right level of detail, and captured nuances that even experienced consultants sometimes missed. Consultants reviewed and sent the drafts with minor edits rather than writing from scratch. What used to take two to three hours now took ten minutes.

The second major win was institutional memory. Ivo maintained a complete, searchable history of every conversation, decision, and follow-up for each engagement. When a consultant transitioned off a project, the incoming consultant could ask Ivo for a comprehensive briefing—and get one that was more complete than any human handoff document. New consultants could get up to speed in a day instead of a week. The partners quickly realized this wasn’t just an efficiency tool—it was a competitive advantage. They began positioning Intelo-powered continuity as a selling point in new business pitches.