"Can you send us a proposal?"
It's a reasonable question. Every business owner asks it every week. Receiving it is reassuring: it means there's interest on the other side. Sending a proposal in the dark, though, is almost always a mistake.
Not because producing a number is hard. It's because that number, without a diagnosis, is a piece of fiction that hurts both sides.
What "in the dark" means
In the dark means without having seen:
- What offer the company is actually selling
- Who it sells to and with what message
- What happens operationally between the first contact and the signature
- Which tools already exist, which ones work, which ones create friction
- Where customers are lost and where margins are made
A proposal written without this information is a combination of two things: a standard price and a level of trust in the client's brief. Both sides pretend to know what they're buying and what they're selling.
The predictable outcome
Almost always the same thing happens. A generic contract gets signed. Two weeks in, reality turns out to be different from the brief. The vendor has to decide: deliver what was quoted (and not solve the real problem), or do more work at the original price (and lose money on it).
Neither option is good. The client gets less than what's needed, or the vendor works at a loss and starts protecting themselves. Both sides lose faith in the process.
What we do instead
When someone asks us for a proposal, our answer is always the same: first we do the assessment.
The assessment is a 45-minute conversation. It's free and without commitments. It isn't a demo. It isn't a sales pitch. It's an hour in which:
- We understand the context. Sector, size, history, market.
- We identify the real problem. Not the one the client describes in the first five minutes, but the one that surfaces after some digging.
- We decide together whether it makes sense. Sometimes we're not the right fit. When that's the case, we say so.
Only after that, if it makes sense on both sides to continue, do we put down a scope and a number. At that point the number stops being fiction: it's a consequence of what we've figured out together.
Why it's free
We get asked this often. The answer is simple: the assessment serves us at least as much as it serves the client. It's our filter for deciding who to work with. Charging for it would turn it into a product, and products get sold to everyone. We don't want to sell it to everyone. We want to do it only when it can lead somewhere.
That's a contradiction only if you think of consulting as a volume of hours to invoice. If instead you think of our work as a multi-year commitment with a few companies at a time, filtering well at the entrance is the most important thing we do.
If you're about to ask someone for a proposal
Before you do, ask yourself: does the person I'm asking actually know what to send me? If the answer is no, what you'll receive isn't a proposal, it's a probability.
The right proposal comes after the diagnosis. Never before.