Every engagement has a worst stretch, and it is almost always the first one. The mandate lands, the clock starts, and before anyone can think about insight, a team has to build the current-state baseline: flood the analysts with the client's messy data room, the static industry reports, and a pile of web research, then assemble a credible picture of where things actually stand.
It takes two to three days. It is exhausting. And it is exactly the window where errors creep in, because tired people pulling all-night analysis runs make the kind of mistakes that surface later, in front of the client.
Why the ramp is so expensive
The ramp is expensive for a reason that has nothing to do with talent. The information is out there. The bottleneck is the labor of gathering it, reconciling it, and turning it into something the team can build on. A data room has three hundred files. The market has a dozen credible sources that disagree with each other. The seller's deck makes claims that need checking. None of it is hard. All of it is slow, and all of it has to happen before the real work begins.
So the first 72 hours get spent on the least leveraged work in the entire engagement, by the most expensive people available, under the most time pressure. It sets a tone, and it eats the margin on the project before a single slide of insight gets made.
Hand the ramp to an agent that does not sleep
This is the part Bricolage is shaped for. You point it at the client's documents and the question, and let it run overnight. It works the data room, the open web, the literature, and the relevant filings in parallel, reconciling what it finds and flagging where sources disagree or where the seller's claims cannot be corroborated.
By the next morning the team has a cited current-state baseline: the market sized, the competitors mapped, the key claims checked, the risks surfaced, each point traced to where it came from. The one-week ramp becomes a one-day turnaround, and the team starts the engagement from insight instead of from a blank page and a pile of PDFs.
The tone it sets instead
When the ramp is done by morning, the rest of the engagement changes shape. The senior people spend the first days interrogating the baseline and forming a point of view, not assembling it. The work that lands in front of the client is more defensible, because every figure in it has a source and the whole run carries an audit trail you can open the moment someone asks where a number came from.
The 72-hour scramble was never about finding information. It was about the labor of getting oriented. Move that labor to an agent that runs for hours without tiring, and the most painful stretch of every engagement becomes the fastest.