Most admissions consultancies start at essays. That is the wrong place to start.
By the time you are staring at a blank essay prompt for INSEAD or Booth or LBS, half the strategic work is already done, or already lost. Your school list shapes what story you need to tell. Your profile shapes which schools are actually realistic. Your story shapes how every essay, every CV bullet, every recommendation letter is positioned. If those foundations are not built first, the essays are just decoration on a wobbly structure.
GradBrew's end-to-end admissions consulting is built around a simple principle: do the work in the right order, and the rest gets easier. Here is what that journey actually looks like, stage by stage.
End-to-end means we work with you from profile evaluation to final admit. Not just essays. Not just school selection. Not just interviews. The full arc of an application cycle, with the same consultants beside you from start to finish.
The journey has seven core stages: profile evaluation, story development, school list calibration, materials build, dual consultant review, submission and interview preparation, and final admit decisions. We will walk through each one.
A few things end-to-end does not include, and we are direct about this upfront. Post-admit support (visa, housing, arrival guidance) is a separate add-on for select countries. Career Builder, our preparation programme for internships and entry-level roles after admit, is a separate paid service. External scholarship applications outside of school-specific ones are not included. Everything else inside the admissions cycle is in scope.
Every package begins with a profile evaluation call. This is not a sales call. It is the first piece of real strategic work, and it sets the direction for everything that follows.
Your lead consultant digs into your academic record, your work experience, your extracurriculars, your goals, your constraints, and your motivation. We identify your genuine strengths, the gaps you need to address, and the strategic positioning that fits your profile. We discuss target geographies, target programmes, target rounds, and target timelines.
The output of this call is not a polished document. It is a shared, honest understanding between you and your consultant about where you stand today and what realistic positioning looks like. Everything in the rest of the package is built on this foundation.
This is the stage most consultancies skip, and it is the most important one.
Before any essay is drafted, before any CV bullet is written, before any LOR is requested, your consultant works with you to build the storyline. Why this career? Why this transition? Why this programme? Why this school? What are the two or three defining experiences that explain who you are and where you are going?
Most candidates struggle here. Not because they lack stories, but because they have never been asked to articulate them. They have lived an interesting life and have no idea how to tell it. They start essays cold and produce content that is technically fine but never quite cohere into a person.
We spend real time on story development because the cost of skipping it is enormous. A clear, authentic narrative makes every subsequent piece of the application easier. It makes the CV sharper. It makes the SOP focused. It makes the LORs aligned. It makes the interviews coherent. Without it, you spend the entire application cycle trying to retrofit a story onto documents that have already been written.
This is also where ethical consulting matters most. Your story is yours. We help you find it, articulate it, and structure it. We do not invent it for you. (We have written a separate piece on why we do not ghostwrite. The short version: your application is your work, and we will not change that.)
The school list is the most consequential strategic decision in the entire application cycle, and it deserves more rigor than most candidates give it.
Our school list recommendations are built from three inputs: your profile and goals (from the evaluation call), GradBrew's historical experience with similar profiles (where comparable candidates landed, where they did not), and current market and class profile data published by the schools themselves. We dig a layer deeper than most candidates ever go into class composition, recruiting outcomes, regional strength, and programme positioning.
We balance three categories: dream schools, high competitive schools, and competitive schools.
We do not do safe schools, and the reasoning is worth understanding. We absolutely could recommend safe schools. We can almost guarantee an admit somewhere if that is the only goal. But guaranteeing an admit and placing you in the best school your profile can earn are two very different services, and we are built for the second one.
Whatever your underlying motivation, whether it is studying abroad, building a global career, settling abroad long-term, gaining a few years of international experience, or simply pursuing a programme you find meaningful, the resources you invest in this application (your time, your money, your one shot at a particular round) should go toward the best possible outcome for you. A safe-school admit gets you in somewhere. It does not necessarily get you closer to where you actually want to end up.
Many traditional consultancies will frame safe schools as "competitive" options, talk up their benefits during the sales pitch, secure an easy admit, and then count your conversion as their success metric. This is not ethical, and we will not do it. These are life-deciding decisions, and they deserve to be made with full honesty about where each school actually sits in your strategy.
Candidates have every right to apply to dream schools that may be a stretch on paper. We support that, and we will tell you directly what would need to be true for the stretch to work. What we will not do is dress up a low-effort admit as a strategic win.
A common pattern we see: a candidate decides to target a high-competitive school list based on an aspirational GMAT score they have not yet achieved. Two months later, the score is not where they hoped, the timeline is tight, the school list is now misaligned with the actual profile, and the cycle is in trouble. The way to avoid this is to calibrate honestly at the start, revisit when scores arrive, and adjust without ego.
Once the story and school list are set, we move into materials: CV, LORs, SOP and essays for each school, recommendation strategy, and any school-specific supplemental requirements.
This stage involves multiple consultant calls and unlimited edits until the material meets the standard required to submit. Not "two rounds of edits and you are done." Unlimited. We work each piece until it is genuinely ready, not until a quota is exhausted.
This is one of the practical reasons our model is structured the way it is. Our consultants are senior, deeply involved, and paid accordingly. Unlimited edits are only possible if mentor time is built into the model from day one, not bolted on as an upsell. It is the trade-off behind our premium positioning, and we think it is the right trade-off.
A note on school-specific scholarship essays. Most top programmes offer scholarships that require additional essays. These are included in our end-to-end support. External scholarships outside the school (third-party foundations, government schemes, regional grants) are not in scope.
Just before you hit submit on each school, a second consultant from a different top programme reviews your finalised material with fresh eyes.
This is a built-in part of our process, not an add-on. The second reviewer is not involved in your build, which is precisely the point. They catch the blind spots your lead consultant has stopped seeing after months of close work. They flag anything missed, misrepresented, or unclear before the file goes to the school.
The full logic and methodology of our dual consultant model is covered in a separate post. The point here is that it is part of every end-to-end engagement.
After dual review, you submit.
If you receive interview invitations (and most of our candidates do), your consultant runs multiple mock interview sessions with you. These are not generic interview prep. They are tailored to the specific school, the specific programme, the specific format (adcom interview, alumni interview, video assessment), and the specific story we have built across your application.
Mocks cover the standard questions, the school-specific ones, the behavioural assessments, and the cases or short prompts that some programmes use. We push you hard, because the schools will too. The goal is for the real interview to feel familiar, not foreign.
This is also where the early story work pays off. Candidates who built their applications around a clear, authentic narrative walk into interviews able to defend every line of their essays. Candidates who did not are the ones who stumble on simple questions like "tell me more about that moment in your essay."
When admits and rejections arrive, we work through the decisions with you. Comparison of programmes, scholarship negotiations (where school policy allows), waitlist strategy, and the question of whether to accept, defer, or reapply.
For most candidates, end-to-end ends here. For those who want post-admit support or Career Builder, those services begin as separate engagements.
Some candidates try to optimise on cost by piecing the journey together. A GMAT coach here, a freelance CV editor there, a YouTube essay guru, a friend who got into a target school last year.
This rarely works as well as it looks on paper. Three reasons.
Voice consistency suffers. Every editor leaves a different fingerprint on your material. The CV sounds like one person, the SOP sounds like another, the essays sound like a third, and adcoms read the inconsistency without being able to name it. The application loses coherence.
Strategic continuity suffers. The freelancer editing your CV does not know what your INSEAD essay says. The interview coach has not read your LBS application. The pieces do not align, because no one is responsible for keeping them aligned.
School-level nuance gets lost. INSEAD does not want what HEC wants. Booth does not want what Wharton wants. A consultant working on your full application across schools knows where to lean into the school-specific positioning. A piecemeal team does not.
End-to-end is not just convenient. It is structurally better. The application is one story told seven different ways for seven different schools, and that requires a single team holding the thread.
A common candidate move: buy a one-school or two-school package, then try to recycle essays across additional schools on their own.
We strongly recommend against this. Top schools ask different questions for a reason. Booth wants different content from LBS. INSEAD wants different content from HEC. The recycling rarely lands well, and adcoms see the seams.
Our minimum recommendation is five schools per cycle. Six to eight is the sweet spot. This gives you enough strategic spread across dream, high competitive, and competitive categories, and enough specific essays to make each application feel genuinely tailored. Below five, the strategy gets fragile. Above eight, the marginal effort usually does not justify the marginal admit probability.
Trust your consultant. Avoid distributed sources. The application is a coherent product, not a collection of recycled parts.
Our pricing reflects what end-to-end actually requires: senior consultant hours across the full journey, no backend writers, no AI-generated content, unlimited edits, dual review, mock interviews, and the kind of strategic continuity that only comes from one team holding the thread from profile evaluation to admit.
We do not run on volume. We do not optimise margins by cutting mentor time. The economics are honest, the work is intensive, and the price reflects both. If you are looking for the cheapest option, we will not be it. If you are looking for the right option for a real shot at a top global programme, we believe we are.
A final note that runs through everything we do.
Most consultancies look at you and see a lead. A conversion. A client. A line in next quarter's revenue forecast. We see a candidate with dreams. The application you are working on is not a transaction for us. It is the next chapter of your life.
End-to-end is how we make sure that chapter starts in the right order, with the right story, at the right schools, with the right preparation. From the first call to the final admit, we work beside you.
Brew your best,
Team GradBrew
GradBrew