Schachter Consulting runs a highly specialized operation: a two-person firm that conducts in-depth interviews with C-suite executives — direct reports, peers, and managers — and synthesizes them into comprehensive 360-degree leadership analyses. It’s a rigorous, high-value process that senior leaders trust to inform their development and advancement decisions. But behind every polished report was a brutal manual grind.

Each engagement required 8 to 15 individual interviews, each packed with nuanced observations about leadership behavior, communication style, and organizational impact. The owner had to read every interview, hold the full picture in their head, cross-reference signals across respondents, and write a synthesis that was both accurate and diplomatically precise. Depending on complexity, that process consumed anywhere from 8 to 24 hours — sometimes stretching across 1 to 3 full working days. For a two-person firm taking on multiple clients, that pace was the ceiling on growth.

Worse, once a report was delivered, it was final. If a client wanted a revised framing or a deeper dive into a specific theme, the owner had to go back to the raw interviews manually. There was no way to interrogate the synthesis, ask why a conclusion was drawn, or generate an improved version without essentially starting over.