The Genius of the Single-Page Project Quote
I hate putting together proposals.
My resistance to the endless parade of tedious details matches your resistance to the next paragraph, which is about them. (Feel free to skip it.)
You know the proposal drill: duplicate the most recent document, write a cover letter, look at your notes, try to remember if you already have similar scope and pricing buried in another proposal, pop open some old proposals hoping to save some time, waste more time than you have saved, give up, type out a list of deliverables, add details about scope, indulge in some anxiety (“What if I forgot something? What if I estimate too little time? Am I about to get hosed?”), raise the pricing a bit, second guess yourself (“What if this is too much and scares the client away?”), have a second helping of anxiety (“If this extra $100 scares the client away, I’ll be kicking myself.”), dive headfirst down the rabbit hole of dire possibilities (“What if the client balks? What if I run out of money? What if all my teeth fall out?”), shake it off, try to remember what you’re forgetting, add some more bullet points or details to each deliverable to make it clear just how many backflips you’ll be doing on the client’s behalf, spellcheck, worry about prices for another 10–15 minutes, tell yourself you’re being ridiculous, tell yourself, “You deserve this!” and “if the client isn’t willing to pay you what you’re worth (and you still are giving her a great deal!) then she is the ridiculous one?” Finally, as you mentally brandish your sword and beat on your shield and drink the blood of your enemies from a gilded skull, you send the email with the proposal attached. Then, you take a long, hot soak in still more anxiety while you wait for her to do the digital equivalent of spit in your face, knock the sword out of your mind-hand, and decapitate your foolish proposal.
Long, exhaustive proposals are a waste of everyone’s time.
Proposals bring us face to face with the fears and frustrations that hover around our freelance businesses like a cloud of gnats.
We agonize over tiny, inconsequential details because we need to send our anxious energy somewhere.
Does the client really want to read a tome overgrown with exclamation points, spiderwebbed with vague promises of mutually beneficial collaborations, and blighted with other atrocities of boiler plate verbiage?
In the words of Will Smith, “Aw, haaaill, no.”
Send quotes instead.
I encourage you to do two things differently, starting today:
- Create a standalone pricing sheet for your own internal use.
- Shrink your proposals into single-page quote.
Your prospect would have looked at a single-page quote right when she opened your email, but your lengthy exposition on your preeminent qualifications is yet another thing she needs to review; yet another task on the mile-long to-do list.
When she does finally get around to reviewing your proposal, the client will do the sensible thing.
She will go straight to the pricing page because that page dictates the rest of the conversation.
- If the price looks right, she might go back and nibble at the rest.
- If the price looks wrong (either too high or too low), then she will email you and say, “We don’t have that kind of budget.” Or, “Let me think it over and get back to you” which means, “Let me shop around your prices and see if someone else will undercut you.” Or, “Thanks so much for putting this together. Unfortunately, we’re going a different direction.” Translation: “You made a good first impression, but you’re so cheap that you must lack confidence and skill.”
And why would she waste her time on reading the whole proposal?
She already has the information she needs to move the conversation down the field. None of the other stuff matters unless the two of you agree upon scope and price.
Include three short sections in your quotes.
I learned the solution from a man named Billy Fulghum of Fulghum Macindoe, a civil engineering firm in Knoxville, Tennessee.
I assumed that their huge engineering projects would require proposals with dozens of pages. We’re talking about tens or hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of people and bureaucracy and red tape and what is known as The Government.
But no. Billy explained that they send a one-pager with three sections:
- What You Get
- What You Don’t Get
- How Much It Costs
Can you hear the audible sigh of relief when the controller of this department or the CFO of that corporation opens the attachment and finds a single page?
One caveat: Obviously, you will eventually require your clients to sign some sort of contract like a master service agreement, client service agreement, or statement of work. That legal document will contain all the terms. Legally binding contracts are important.
But when you’re in the early stages and still selling the person on working with you, it is in your best interest to turn around a quote really, really fast; so fast the clients head spins.
That way, you can capitalize on the buzz and enthusiasm from the initial meeting and reinforce the idea that you’re going to be responsive throughout the project. You say, “We’ve got efficient systems and processes in place that enable us to send you an initial quote quickly.”
One drawback of waiting to send a proposal (because you didn’t want to create it) is that you’re sending the wrong message: “When you work with me, you’re going to have to wait on me then too.”
Shrink the format.
The most obvious way to produce quotes more quickly is to shrink the format of the quote from whatever you’re doing now to a single page or even a few bullet points pasted into the body of an email.
The primary purpose of the quote is to settle on a rough price and a rough scope so that you can move the conversation to the next stage which is for me client service agreement.
Furthermore, if your prospect is talking to more than one freelancer and you move the conversation along faster than everyone else, you become the obvious choice.
Since I kicked proposals out of my life forever and started using single-page quotes instead, not a single client has asked for a proposal.
You know why?
EVERYBODY HATES PROPOSALS.
Someone may, from time to time, ask you to respond to an RFP (Request for Proposals). Inefficiency begets inefficiency. That company is already 90% sure which agency they are going to hire. They’re just going through the motions to satisfy some company protocol.
Do yourself and your clients a favor. Keep it to a page. The clients you want are the clients who want you. They have a comfortable range they’re willing to pay, and you have a ballpark estimate of what you’d like to make.
Finding a happy compromise should be a brief formality. The selling and buying should happen long before you sent the project quote.
Do you want my project quote template for free?
Click this link to share your name and email address, and I’ll send you the download link.
The template I use is simple and effective. The key is to keep the conversation moving, not to give prospects so much information that they start overthinking. Also, you’ll like the “valid” language at the bottom.
