Episode 113: I Will Solve Your Problem, and You Will Pay Me
What separates a consultants proposal from a contractor’s proposal?
Summary
Nick and Kai walk through the anatomy of a consulting proposal, from diagnosing what a client actually needs before writing anything to what should go on the page. Both share their full proposal structures, and both argue that padding with credentials and awards is a contractor habit that loses deals.
Highlights
- Nick’s proposal never exceeds three pages: statement of the problem, the solution, outcomes (not deliverables), specific dates, and price. A missed payment deadline voids it and forces a new one so he can plan cash flow.
- Kai’s proposal runs 750–1,500 words across six sections: situation appraisal, objectives, measures of success, value to the organization, methodology with three tiered options, and administrative terms. Putting payment terms in the proposal means objections surface before the contract, not after.
- Nick tried a three-tier proposal for the first time the week of recording and closed $30K with it. The tiers map to a price-conscious option, the margin target, and a premium.
- Kai records qualifying calls over Zoom, runs the audio through Rev.com for a transcript, then copy-pastes the client’s own words directly into the proposal draft before wordsmithing it into final form.
- Both treat a client’s opening request as a situation, not a problem. The diagnostic work before writing anything is the same as a doctor running tests before prescribing: the client knows something is wrong but can’t name what it is.
- Nick’s rule for hesitant proposals: if you don’t feel hellbent about it, go back and ask questions until you do. If you’re dreading the work at the bidding stage, it’s not a fit.
- Nick warns against pitch decks, award lists, and credential sections. He says he has never made a pitch deck and that designers who lead with those are covering up a lack of confidence in the actual solution.
Read the transcript
That’s amazing.
The crazy thing about that is it’s a bit unnecessary. It’s like you have. Let’s say you have a vegetable in front of you and you want to chop up the vegetable and serve it to your family. Okay, here’s a grain thresher. Put the vegetable in the grain thread. It’ll work. You’ll chop it up.
But a bit overcompensated. I agree it’s a bit overcompensative, but I think back to the story you shared before we started recording where you tell the historic story of this and then I’ll jump in with it.
So basically, Steve Jobs was kicked out of Apple. He started a new company called Next, and they make computers, whatever. And he is like, what is the best graphic designer that I could possibly find? And somebody recommends him, a fellow named Paul Rand. If you’re not a designer, Paul Rand is like one of those legendary figures in graphic design in the 20th century. He is especially known for logo design and branding. He made E. G. IBM, ABC. UPS, non-TLA logos like the Yale University Press and what else, Westinghouse, like really amazing iconic logos, right? And Steve Jobs is like, okay, great. So what can you do for me? He’s like, I’ll make a logo for you. He’s like, okay, well, can you make like three concepts and then I’ll pick one? He’s like, no, no. I’m going to solve your problem and you will pay me. And he comes up with one logo after a lengthy research process. Steve Jobs, and you know, you can use or not use a logo that a graphic designer makes for you, ends up employing it and becomes, you know. That’s how it goes. He was the face of Next for the entire duration of that company. And I like that idea. I like that it can be very clear-cut. I like that there is a conversation where Two things happened here, right? One of them is that the conversation got focused on there’s a problem. You don’t have a logo. You need a way to represent your brand. You recognize that this is a problem you’re feeling. Sounds a lot like a lot of the expensive problem type stuff that we’ve been talking about on this podcast. But then the second thing is this refocusing of the conversation away from one of the most bullheaded humans of all time, Steve Jobs, right? Like, No, he said no to Steve Jobs and said, Here’s how we’re going to do it. And Steve Jobs blinked and said, Fair enough. Right. So for one, like, oh my God, something got put over on Steve Jobs. Like. Does that ever happen by anyone except Paul Rand? But also number two, that’s what really differentiates consultative work from contractorial work, right? I can tell you every single client, every single client that draft has had They come to me with a problem. They think they have a problem. And I, the fundamental thing in the back of my head is: no, you don’t. You don’t actually have this problem. There’s something underlying the problem. There’s either a fear or sense of risk, or somebody told you to come to me, or something, right? And That doesn’t mean that your feelings are invalid or that your ideas are nonsense, right? I want to be abundantly clear about that. What it means is that there’s an opportunity to dig and diagnose. And understand the real source of the thing. It’s not that you have this weird, thinky, complicated thing going on, it’s that your customers are pissed at you. It’s that you’re losing money to a competitor. It’s that you are concerned about churn in some capacity. There’s some sort of usually negative feeling behind it, like fear, whatever. Or. You’re growing really hard, and you want to step back and understand how to grow more deliberately and intentionally. That’s another very common expression. Explanation for people coming to draft. It’s like, oh, well, now I have a bucket of money. Now I can hire some consultants to try and help me out. And that’s why consulting is not a bad thing. It just means you’re hiring really smart people. Who can hopefully help you in a business capacity? That’s what good consulting is. And consulting gets a bum rat because you end up hiring contractors that charge too much.
It’s not a consultant. One thing I’d love to elaborate on there is the concept you touched on of clients and prospects coming believing they have a problem, but not quite Having a problem or understanding the problem, that’s something that I dive into in my book on road mapping projects. And my take on it is Clients will approach us thinking that they have a problem, but what a client really has is a situation. They are experiencing some situation, there’s inputs. They don’t know what the problem is yet because they’re too mired in it to actually diagnose what the issue is. Just like if you go to a doctor, you know what you’re experiencing. You know, hey, doc, I feel ill. You can’t say, oh, you know what? I have these three things. Please prescribe me XYZ. The doc needs to do a diagnosis, do a test, understand what the problem actually is before they could prescribe a solution. So I really like the distinction between. Clients come to you with a situation, something they’re experiencing. Our job as a consultant is to unpack that and understand what the problem underlying that solution is. To jump off your other example, maybe there’s concerns about churn. Well, okay. That might not be the problem. The problem might be we have terrible onboarding and we lose a ton of our customers because we aren’t onboarding them. If we just attack the churn problem, we’re attacking the wrong problem. We need to understand the situation. We have a high churn rate, and then understand what the problem is: lack of onboarding, lack of customer support, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Yeah, yeah, I think that all makes a lot of sense. What I’m kind of working towards, and why we’re doing this. particular episode. We went a really long time without actually talking about proposals, and that’s because the proposal is kind of immaterial. What you’re doing is creating a process that works towards the proposal. Here are the actual contents of my proposal. Every single proposal that I’ve ever done in the history of draft does this. It is a statement of the problem. And I speak to you. I say, this is prepared for John Doe, Jane Doe of XYZ Corporation. And then I pretend like I am sitting John or Jane down and laying out the problem. And I’d spend no more than five paragraphs and one page on this. I say, this is the problem. This is my reading of the problem. Here are the consequences of not actually tackling this problem. The problem is acutely felt here in this way. And then at the end of that, you segue into what you believe the solution is that will try and address this problem. And so the next thing that we’re going to be talking about in the proposal is The solution to the problem, and why it in particular is a solution to the problem. Because it’s not enough to just say, you have a problem, I’m going to do wireframes, it’s you have a problem, I’m going to do this. And this is usually I’m going to create detailed wireframes for this particular functionality and et cetera. Then the next part of my proposal is the outcomes. What should you be able to do after the project is done? And it’s not, you have wireframes, congratulations. That’s A rather tautological outcome.
You should, at this point, have wireframes, ideally.
You’re gonna have wireframes. It’s like the Zelda music playing in the background. Like, no, nobody, you don’t even ship those. What you need is a concrete strategy that you can hand off to any developer and get built out in order to more clearly understand the functionality of a product that’s pleasurable and easy to use, right? That’s the broadest, like draftiest thing that I can possibly tell you that we do, right? But like, normally I’ll say, hopefully, it will end up reducing churn in these particular ways. And then the final two bits of it are like dates, like exactly when we should expect kickoff payment and da da da da. And I list out specific dates. The proposal has a due date, and then I list price. And if you like that, you sign, I send an invoice, you pay me on time. If you don’t pay me on time, the proposal becomes invalid. And then we have to write up another proposal. And the reason that we do that is so that I can actually plan cash flow effectively because I’m a business. I need to plan cash flow effectively. It’s entirely possible a proposal will go invalid, and then somebody else will, you know, take my time instead.
The words of the kids these days slide into the DMs and steal that contract.
They slide into the DMs and steal my contract and they pay me. You don’t pay me. And so why are we having that conversation? But anyway, so that is the anatomy fundamentally of every proposal that I have ever made, right? And it’s I guess people think that’s Interesting? I don’t know. It usually never runs more than three pages. In fact, I can’t remember a situation where it has run more than three pages. Six months projects are three pages of proposal. It’s just here are all the deadlines. There you go. Is this satisfactory to you? If it’s not, we change some things. That’s completely fine. But like, you know It’s something that you just fudge, yeah.
Do you do separate statements of work from the contracts?
Yeah. So, what I have is a master services agreement, and that governs all the work you do with me for five years. And that dictates all the nonsense legal stuff like payment, force majeure. Intellectual property transfer, like when I complete the work, I only you only get my work upon full payment. And you have to pay me up front in order to reserve my time. Just broad statementy things that we’ve talked about a lot on this. And so once that gets solidified, then I send along what’s called a statement of work. Which is the proposal that I just spent a minute talking about. Does that make sense?
I use my proposals run a bit longer in terms of I don’t know if page count is the best analysis for this word count Mine usually comes in between 750 and 1500 words, and I’ll run through sections in a proposal like situation appraisal. What exactly did they tell me was going on? And just restate that in the client for all of these sections, restate as much as I can in the client’s own words, in the client’s own voice. From situation appraisal, I’ll move forward to objectives. What exactly are we aiming for? We could think of this as sort of the bookends of the project. The situation is what they came to me with, the objectives is what they’re aiming for. Okay, great. The middle is diagnosing the problem, prescribing a solution, and doing a thing. After objectives, I’ll move into measures of success. How exactly will we determine that this project has been a success or not? And this typically comes directly from the client’s mouth. I’ll ask the client: how will we know if this will be successful? What will you be measuring? Who will be in charge of measuring it? And Their answers directly inform what those measures of success are, or tell me they’re aiming for a measure of success that just is not possible, in which case Pre-proposal, I’ll reset the expectations and say, you know what, in two months, we probably aren’t going to be able to add $100,000 in revenue to your business. That’s probably a year-long project. Let’s focus on a couple other things here in terms of measures of success. Following to that, I’ll break out the value to the organization. Typically, anything where it either increases profit, increases revenue, decreases cost, or decreases time. And then I’ll get into exactly what we’ll be doing: the methodology and options. I like a three-option proposal. So I’ll break down: hey, option one, we’ll do this. Option two, we’ll do one and this. Option three, we’ll do one and two, and this additional thing. And then I’ll get into some more administrative things: what the timing looks like on the project. We’ll kick off on this date, what the schedule looks like, it’ll take this many weeks, what payment looks like. Hey, you need to pay ahead of time to reserve the time on my calendar. That’s about it. It runs through, yeah, it covers some of the details that are also in the contract, but I enjoy having things like Terms and conditions around fees, payment terms, project scheduling, expiration in the proposal as well as the contractor statement of work, just so people are exposed to it early on. And if there’s any redlining or red flagging that’s going to happen over the proposal. It hits during the proposal stage, not once they’ve accepted the proposal and we move towards contract.
Yeah, I like a lot of that. The three-tiered bit, I’ve not done that until last week, and then I closed 30K of work. With it. So, um, yes, more of that. Uh, three-tier proposal looks exactly like the like classic base camp pricing grid, where it’s like the option for people who are price conscious, the option you want to make your margins on, and then the premium deluxe option where you have a good problem on your hands
Now, just imagine this. You did a three-tier proposal and you brought in that much revenue. What if you did a 10-tier proposal?
No. So one thing that I wanted to bring back in this that I think is very important is something you mentioned about kind of reflecting the client’s language back to them. A lot of proposal writing is active listening. And one thing that I found myself like, I’ll occasionally send proposals to people that I’m talking to on this podcast for critique. And they’ll reply back with, Well, this is weird. Why do you have this here? And the answer is because it came up on a call, right? It’s because I noticed it in a client, something like that. There was a proposal I wrote fairly recently where somebody A client was extremely overenthusiastic to get started, like more than anyone had any right to be. And so I viewed that as a potential drain on my time once you actually pay me and we start to work together. And so I talked about not only because it could be a drain on my time, but also because it kind of goes against optimization methodology. Optimization is an intentional, deliberate process that takes a long time and involves a lot of research. And if you’re not in on that, go find another optimizer. There’s a million JavaScript people on Upwork, right? And no harm, no foul. Like, you just didn’t find the right person right now, and you’re thinking the wrong things when you wanted me. And And I don’t think that’s bad. But I mentioned, so then I like outright mentioned in the proposal, like, this is draft. We are more like Nick Offerman’s woodworking studio than IKEA. We spend a lot of time whittling away at something, and we need the time and space to be able to do that. And if you’re a very move fast and break things company, run. And they took the proposal, you know? Like, and it’s okay if they don’t because it means you avoided a weird, scary situation.
Yes, yes. I mean, leaping off of that point, I think there’s inherently as part of the human condition a fear of rejection, and proposals just bring that out in such a great magnitude. And really To be an effective consultant, you need to become okay with the fact that not every proposal is going to be accepted. And it often isn’t your fault. It’s they have a request or they have a need that you aren’t able to meet. And okay, it’s just two people with needs that. Aren’t be able to met with each other, let’s go in separate directions.
Yeah, yeah. And I think that I have compartmentalized my feelings around the proposal to after it gets sent. Like there’s this indefinite period about all the things that can possibly go wrong with it. But you can’t be thinking about that when you’re actually writing the proposal, or you will lose it. You will. You have to negotiate from a position of abundance and confidence, or you’re just not. You’re not going to close it.
No, completely agreed. Jumping back again to using your clients’ voice and language, one small thing I started doing this year, since I work remotely with all of my clients, I’ll have my initial qualifying calls sort of that sanity check call and then The initial call to assess whether we’re going to be a good match or not. Over Zoom, I’ll record that. And what I’ve started doing is then running those files, just the audio versions of it. Through Rev. com, giving me a transcript of the entire conversation. And so when it comes time to think about, okay, what exactly is it they’re trying to have me solve? What language do they use? Listening through the audio is valuable and helps you get a sense of the emotional tenor of the voice and what they’re sharing. But reading through it is also valuable because you’re then able to say, okay, great, let me pull the section, put it in here, start building out my proposal of just Copy-pasted blocks of text from this transcript, and then I find it easy to wordsmith it into that final proposal format.
Yeah, yeah, I like that a lot, where you’re kind of pulling out that kind of language. I do that in shorthand when I’m taking notes on the call, and I just take an ungodly amount of notes. The benefit of that is that you get to see my fancy ass fountain pen on the video call.
That’s a closer.
Kind of like people are impressed by they notice seriously. And it’s tiny. Like, how can you notice this thing on a Skype call? But yeah, the more you pay attention to the more of your attention that I have on the phone call, the more likely it is the project is going to go well, I find. Even and that is independent from enthusiasm. It’s related, but it’s independent. If I don’t have your attention, it’s probably not going to go well.
No, and I’ve had things and this diverges a little bit from proposals, but I’ve had initial conversation calls with clients who Don’t turn on the webcam, don’t want to do a video call. And earlier on, I was okay with that and more accommodating, but I’ve started seeing it more and more as a brown MM, a red flag. And if somebody isn’t willing to show their face on a video call so we could see each other eye to eye and assess like What do you need done? Can I help? Is this something I can honestly help with? Let’s talk through it. If we can’t have that direct dialogue face to face, looking each other in the eye. It’s probably not going to be a good proposal, and it’s probably not going to be a good client engagement. So I think there’s a lot of value in having it be a face-to-face conversation, even if it’s over webcam.
Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. What else do we need to be talking about in the actual proposal format? I feel like we’ve kind of handled Everything that I would think to integrate in there. Objection busting, is that a thing?
I think objection busting is a thing. I typically use that in the situation appraisal and The measure of success and the value to the organization sections because I find objections will typically pop up around there. Hey, we’re kind of worried about the cost, or we don’t know what the problem is. Well, that’s part of the situation you’re dealing with. Hey, we aren’t sure how to measure success on this, and that makes us worried. Well, let’s define the measures in the proposal or define the measures beforehand and echo them in the proposal. So, I think objection-busting does play in here. One question I’d ask to you is, for people that are more on the contractor side of things, what would be one or two easy optimizations they can make to start moving their proposals In this direction towards being more of a consultant’s proposal than a contractor’s proposal.
Number one thing is to try and unask Clients, questions with as much empathy and understanding as you possibly can. Like, if they come in and say, We want this kind of work, it’s tell me more about that. Like, give me more about the background here. And then when you’re doing active listening and reflecting those statements back to them, say, it sounds to me like this is the case. And maybe you’re wrong, that’s fine. But then you keep trying to chip away at it and you get more understanding, you ask more questions. That sort of diagnosis process is absolutely critical to establishing a consultative practice and not Contractorials practice. The other thing that I would recommend doing is pair back your proposal to be as short and to the point as humanly possible so that you are not clearly wasting the client’s time. Designers hate this. They hate it. They want to talk so much about all the previous clients they’ve had and all the awards they’ve won and all the places they’ve been published and gone to speak, nobody gives a shit. They don’t. They care about what it’s worth to their business.
You think it’s bad in the design industry? It is ten times as bad in the construction industry. I was writing forty-page RFPs where 30 pages were like Here are lists of the previous buildings we built. Here are our awards. Here is a resume for each individual person on the team we’re proposing. Two pages describing the project.
Hell no. Hell no. Yeah. Yeah. So designers generally, they want to talk about themselves a lot and they want to like make a brand deck or something like that, like a pitch deck. I haven’t made one of those in my entire career. And I guarantee you I’m making more as a designer than probably ninety nine percent of people that you know. That other one percent is making bonkers money and they get all the credit and publicity and stuff. But like All the journeymen designers out there, no. No. And they’re all sharing their logos and talking about how they wear a young gun once. And I don’t even know what that means.
I don’t even know what that means. I’ve banned guns.
Thank you. Young or otherwise anyway, um I hope that we gave some sort of insight into how to write a proposal and how to kind of get to the point. Edit back your content a lot. I spend a lot of time editing my proposals and a lot of time running them by other consultants. Having a support network of other consultants who can hold your ideas in confidence and help you write a really damn good proposal. Oh my God, hold them close. Like other independent consultants are tremendously valuable on this front. Present company included. So yeah.
Heart. No, completely agreed. And jumping back to your earlier point, I think across industries, there’s a habit of putting more content into a proposal because of A feeling of riskiness or uncertainty on the consultant side. I’m not super confident in this or this project, so I’ll put a lot of words in this proposal and hopefully that will make up for my lack of confidence in this. And that’s the wrong way to approach it. If you’re Sort of covering up a lack of certainty or a lack of confidence with more words in a proposal, it’s not going to land as solidly. And you’re better off saying, Hey, client, I know I said day X to get you this proposal, but You know, I have four more questions that we really need to discuss and answer before I’m able to put together a good proposal. So we need to push back the delivery date. And can you email across these answers or let’s schedule a time for a call? If you have that uncertainty, get more information from the client so you’re able to write a better proposal.
Yeah, yeah. Maybe don’t talk about the delivery day pushback, but just be like, you know, if you’re on, if you don’t feel hellbent, about the proposal, here’s a rule. If you don’t feel hellbent about the proposal, go back and ask questions until you feel hellbent about the proposal. If you don’t feel excited about the proposal, like you’re dreading bidding on this work, it’s not a good fit run.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Now I was about to say the exact same thing. If you have hesitancy around it, if you have that sense of dread around it, it’s not a good fit. It’s something you’re going to regret. Please, please do not accept it. Yeah, if it’s not a good fit, don’t accept it and go in that other direction. It’s better to say no to a project, even if it gets to the late proposal stage, if you’re not feeling it, than accept something and regret it down the line.