You will produce a one-page proposal with options for a real or practice buyer.
Proposals tend to grow. You start with a page, add a section on your approach, a page about your company, some case studies, a terms appendix, and soon you are sending eight pages that nobody reads past the price. A one-page proposal forces you to keep only what helps the buyer decide.
This exercise walks you through writing one, using Priya's proposal for Joel as the worked example. You will need your presentation outline from lesson 1.4, Turn discovery notes into a presentation outline, the options you designed in lesson 2.2, Offer options without confusing the buyer, and about forty minutes. The prices below are Priya's, used as examples only.
Take the opening paragraph from your presentation outline and adapt it for the page. You already wrote it in the buyer's words and checked it with them. Now trim it so someone who missed the meetings could follow it, as in lesson 2.1, What every proposal must contain.
Priya's opening: "You run two cafes in Tiong Bahru. You and your wife do the books on Sunday nights, about five hours a week, and the two outlets close up differently, so you cannot always tell whether a till gap is a mistake or something worse. Your accountant needs clean records by the end of February. You want your Sundays back and a till that matches the sales every week."
Four sentences. Anyone reading it, including Joel's wife or his accountant, now knows why the rest of the page exists.
Below the opening, set out your two or three options side by side. A table works best: one column per option, and rows for what it includes, what changes for the buyer, and the cost. Keep the rows identical across options, so the differences jump out.
Priya's table has three columns. The rows read:
What is included: monthly books for both outlets in every column, then a monthly till check, a weekly till reconciliation, or a weekly reconciliation plus a quarterly cash flow meeting What changes for you: a till gap found within a month, within a week, or within a week with a plan for each quarter Monthly fee: S$350, S$450 or S$550 One-off catch-up of last year's records: S$600 in every column
Under the table, Priya adds one line on terms: billed monthly, first month invoiced when work starts, one month's notice to stop.
It helps to give the buyer the yearly figure too, because that is the one they will compare with the cost of the problem. Priya works it out before she writes it down. Option two is S$450 a month for 12 months, which is S$5,400 a year, plus the S$600 one-off in the first year, so S$6,000 in year one. Joel estimated in discovery that the books cost him about S$6,500 a year in time and extra accountancy. Check your own arithmetic on a calculator before it goes on the page. A wrong sum in a proposal does more damage than a high price.
Mark one column as your recommendation, and write the reason in one sentence that uses what the buyer told you.
Priya's: "I recommend option two, because you said the thing that worries you most is not knowing whether a gap is a mistake or something worse, and weekly checks tell you within days."
If your sentence needs the word "because" twice, it is probably two reasons, and one of them is yours rather than the buyer's. Keep the one that comes from them.
Then close the page with what happens if the buyer says yes, and any real date that matters.
Priya's last lines: "If you would like to go ahead, reply with the option you prefer and I will send the engagement letter. To have last year's records ready for your accountant by the end of February, I would need to start by the second week of January."
That date is real. It comes from the accountant's deadline and the three weeks the catch-up takes, and Priya says so. It is not a reason to rush Joel. It just tells him what the deadline means for the start date.
Give the page to a colleague or friend who knows nothing about the buyer. Do not explain it. Ask them to tell you back, in their own words, what the buyer's problem is, what each option gives them, which one you recommend and why, and what happens next.
Wherever they stumble, fix the page. Priya's friend could not explain what "reconciliation" meant, so Priya changed it to "checking each till against the sales for that week." Her friend also asked whether the S$600 was paid once or every month, which led to the word "one-off" being added in two places.
A finished proposal fits on one page. It opens with the buyer's situation in their words. It sets out two or three options in a table with matching rows, each solving the core problem. It marks one recommendation with a one-sentence reason drawn from the buyer, and ends with the next step and any real date. A cold reader can explain it back to you without help.
Bring your outline and options to the activity below and start with the opening paragraph.
Write the one-page proposal, ask a colleague to read it cold, and fix anything they could not explain back to you.
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