Built by someone who has had to defend the number.

Every agency estimates work. Very few estimate it the same way twice. The number that reaches a client is usually assembled under time pressure, in a spreadsheet built for one deal, by whoever happened to be free that week — and then it becomes the budget, the schedule, and the margin target for a team that had no part in setting it.

What follows is predictable enough to be a genre: scope creeps because the assumptions were never written down, timelines slip because the staffing was never modelled, margin erodes a few percent at a time, and the team burns out defending a plan nobody can reconstruct. Everyone agrees it should be done better next time. It rarely is, because the evidence of what actually happened is scattered across files nobody reopens.

Big Earnie started as an internal tool built to fix exactly that for one consulting firm. It replaces the ad hoc spreadsheet with a single governed model of an engagement — scope it, staff it, price it, risk-adjust it, and generate the SOW from the same numbers — so the estimate, the proposal, and the delivery plan are the same artifact rather than three that drift apart.