A proposal for a client
A proposal loses on precision, not on price. The client didn't understand what they were buying and picked whoever was clearer.
So work on a proposal starts neither with the price nor with your studio deck, but with one question.
The first question: why do you need design
Not «what needs doing» but why. The answers differ, and everything follows from them: launch a product, attract an investor, lift sales, stop being embarrassed by the website in front of partners.
Until you have that answer, any proposal is guesswork. With it, it becomes clear what must be in scope and what can wait.
A precise proposal removes half the price objections in advance. A client argues with the price when they can't see what they are paying for.
What it is made of
- The business task — one sentence, in the client's words, not yours.
- What's included — countable: how many options, mockups, slides, rounds of revisions.
- How long it takes — stages and dates, not one date at the end.
- The price — as options, not a range. How to build them: a menu instead of a range.
- What you need from the client — materials, access, who decides and how fast.
The last point is the one people skip, and it is the one that sets the timeline: a project runs long not because you draw slowly, but because you wait a week for an answer.
Arguments: the language of management, not quality
Quality is a weak argument. It is subjective, it can't be verified before the work starts, and the argument quickly turns into «I don't like the blue».
The strong arguments live in what the client manages every day: risk, deadlines, process, control. How many rounds of revisions are included. What happens if the schedule slips. How they will know halfway through that things are on track.
It is the same conversation about money, held in a language where the other person has experience.
Checklist
1. Understand the business task — why they need design.
2. Put the scope in numbers, not adjectives.
3. Offer options; the gap between the extremes is at least two or three times.
4. If the budget is smaller — cut the value, not the price.
5. Lead the conversation with questions instead of waiting to be asked about budget.
6. Argue with deadlines and risks, not with quality.
7. After the call, review what worked and prepare answers to the questions that keep coming back.
Where the numbers come from
The price in a proposal is hours times a rate, not a feeling. Once the project runs, the hours land on it and you see whether you hit the estimate.
After a few projects you have your own statistics: how long a logo, a site, a deck actually take. With those, the next proposal takes half an hour to assemble and misses less often.
Next: a menu instead of a range, the method: what an hour is made of, all the guides.