Success Story — Catie Wheeler – AEC Marketing Leader
Who
Catie – Marketing and Business Development lead at a 60‑year‑old AEC firm, responsible for modernising go‑to‑market as a team of one.
Problem
As the firm’s first dedicated marketer, Catie was supporting brand, proposals, BD and content across the whole business. Individual proposals could take around 20 hours and pulled engineers off billable work, and it was hard to keep messaging tailored for different ICPs (developers vs architects) while moving fast. Bringing in an agency for campaigns would have cost roughly an entire annual Ella licence for a single project.
What they wanted
She wanted agency‑level deliverables without agency‑level spend, faster proposal and campaign output so technical staff stayed billable, and clear, ICP‑specific messaging she could rely on in business development conversations.
What they did with Ella
- Built a firm Brand Bot that understands the company’s sectors, differentiators, proof and tone, so proposals and campaigns started from the right base.
- Used Ella to tailor messaging by ICP, turning relationships and meeting notes into segmented ‘reliability’ narratives for architects and for developers.
- Cut proposal drafting time by uploading RFPs, the firm overview and past responses, then using Ella to generate first‑draft proposals for refinement.
- Designed a segmented reliability campaign in‑house, creating a direct‑mail series in Ella that would otherwise have cost about the annual Ella subscription via an external agency, then replicating it across audiences.
Results and benefits
Catie now produces proposal drafts in hours instead of roughly 20, keeping engineers billable while she handles the first versions. She has ICP‑precise messaging at her fingertips and has offset the cost of Ella with a single segmented campaign that would have been outsourced in the past.
‘Proposals in hours – not 20 hours. My engineers stay billable while I deliver first drafts.’
‘One segmented campaign would have cost an agency about my entire annual Ella licence – we produced it in‑house and multiplied it across audiences… Ella is my senior‑level teammate – a collaborator and thought partner, not just a writer.’