What you get after a First Agent Audit

Example: a 12-person Dallas CPA firm

Prepared by Paul Buckley, Berry Buckley · Dallas

What we heard

• New-client inquiries come in through the website form, the general phone line and info@. Many of them arrive after 5 and on weekends, especially during tax season.
• info@ is a mix of prospects, vendor pitches and messages meant for existing client managers. A partner sorts it every morning.
• Prospects often don't say whether they need tax prep, monthly bookkeeping or cleanup, so the first call usually goes to sorting that out.
• The firm uses Google Workspace for email and calendar and HubSpot for contacts.

The workflow we'd automate first

After-hours new-client intake. It's a single job, it's easy to measure, and it doesn't touch client files. Invoice follow-up came up too, and we'd look at it after this agent has earned its keep.

What the agent would do

• Reply to new form and info@ inquiries in the firm's approved voice
• Set aside vendor pitches and wrong numbers, and send existing-client messages to the right manager
• Ask the intake questions: type of service, entity type, timing and how they heard about the firm
• Book qualified prospects onto the right partner's calendar, or queue them for morning review
• Log each inquiry in HubSpot with a short summary

What it would not do

• Give tax or accounting advice, or quote fees
• Open returns, tax software, the document portal or client files
• Reply to anything outside its approved script without a person reviewing it first

Guardrails

• The owner playbook lists what it can read, what it can send and what it must never touch, and the partners approve it before launch
• Access is limited to the inquiry form, info@, the partner calendars and HubSpot contacts
• Every message is logged, and anything unclear goes to a person

What we need from you

• One partner as the approver and point of contact
• Your current intake questions and the replies you already send
• Your routing rules: which partner or manager handles what
• Admin access to the form, info@, the calendars and HubSpot, granted at the start of the build

Sprint plan and timeline

• Week 0: Audit and this brief
• Weeks 1 to 3: Drate builds and tests the agent on your tools. You approve the playbook before it runs on its own.
• Day 28: Review response time, error rate and how many of your minutes it still needs. You keep it, we tune it, or you stop it.
• Fee: fixed scope, fixed fee (sprints start at $7,500; care plans from $750/month). You own the agent.

Next step

Reply to approve the sprint and we'll confirm a start date. We run two sprints at a time, so if we're full you'll get a real date. If it's not the right time, you keep the brief.