Proposal Template for the Busy and Unbothered

I don't go for fancy, I go for DONE

When wooing new clients, I’m the underdog in a rom-com. People don’t fall for my looks, they fall for my personality! For example, longtime readers know that my evergreen New Year’s resolution is to get my own website and I fail every single year. Habitual smokers got nothing on me. Since I’ve managed to get by on word-of-mouth and two-paragraph emails, with a few links to my work, I continue to put inesbellina.com on the perpetual backburner.

This devil-may-care attitude is now seeping into other areas of my freelance personal branding. Case in point: the almighty proposal. What is a proposal? From what I can gather (lol forever), it’s a document where you tell potential clients how much your services cost. Usually, it describes the project you would be contracted for, the specific tasks you would complete, and your fees/rates, and payment terms.

I can’t remember the first time a lead asked me to send such a formality, but I do remember my reaction: Excuse me, you want me to do what now? I had seen proposals before, but like from my ad agency days. I do not have any Keynote skills beyond badly filling in templates and fuck if I was going to do all that work for a contract that wasn’t six figures, especially if I didn’t have the livelihood of 50 employees at stake.

Instead of crying over Adobe Photoshop, I took the easy way out: Googling “proposal template” and using whatever looked the most organized. Or maybe I used one from Word. Or maybe a friend sent the one they use and I’ve been copy + pasting the crap out of it. Who knows! Who cares! The one I use works fine. I’ve landed enough projects with it. If I’ve lost any, I doubt it’s because of a lack of aesthetics. It more likely has to do with budget. (Pro tip: Budget is almost always the number one reason for anything.)

Here is what I use: