Track B · Private sector
No rubric.
Which makes it
harder, not easier.
A private buyer will not disqualify you for a missing notary. There is no page cap, no addendum, no clerk with a checklist. There is also no published list of what they are weighing, which means the proposal has to reconstruct their decision and answer it before they finish reading.
The criteria still exist. They are held by three people who will never all be in the same meeting, and your document has to survive being forwarded to the one who was not on the call.
Scoped by phone · Fixed price · Proposals start at $750
Nobody sends you this list. The proposal answers it anyway.
A public bid dies loudly.
A commercial one just stops.
On the government track the failure mode is a rejection letter: you were removed, on a stated ground, on a known date. It is brutal and it is at least legible.
Commercial proposals fail differently. Nobody tells you the document was forwarded to a finance lead who had not heard of you, that it opened on a phone and the pricing sat three scrolls below the pitch, or that the scope read as open-ended and the real objection was never spoken out loud. The deal simply goes quiet, and by the time you follow up the internal conversation has already happened without you.
So the document is built to be read twice: once by the person you spoke to, and once, cold, by whoever they hand it to.
Forwarded and unsupported
The person who has to approve it was not on the call. If the proposal only makes sense with you narrating it, it does not make sense.
Priced without a reference point
A single number invites comparison to whatever the reader imagines. A structure gives them something to choose between instead of something to react to.
Won, then unbounded
Scope written to sound generous during the sale is scope you fund yourself during delivery. The boundary has to exist before the signature, not after the third request.
What you receive, itemised.
One engagement covers one buyer and one opportunity. The template that comes out of it is yours to run on the next ten without us.
Make the yes
the easy answer.
This section is about the number you put in front of your buyer. Ours is further down the page and it works differently.
A lone figure with no structure around it forces the reader to invent a comparison, and the comparison they invent is never flattering. Two or three shaped options change the question from should we do this at all to which of these — and they let the buyer choose the smaller one instead of choosing nothing, which is the outcome a single price quietly rules out.
The mechanics matter as much as the amount. What triggers each payment, what the buyer has in hand at that moment, and what happens to the schedule if their side is late are all decisions the proposal should make rather than leave to a later email.
Give the price a reference point
A number is only expensive relative to something. If you do not supply the something, the reader will.
Name a default
Options without a recommendation transfer your job to the buyer. Say which one you would pick for them, and why, in one sentence.
Tie payments to milestones
Money that moves when something is delivered is easier to approve than money that moves because a month ended.
Price the boundary, not just the work
State the rate or the mechanism for what falls outside scope. The absence of one is not generosity; it is an invitation.
Some private buyers
run a public process.
Large corporates, hospital systems, universities, franchisors and anyone spending grant or pass-through public money frequently issue a formal solicitation with scored criteria and mechanical submission rules. It arrives by email and looks like a commercial opportunity. It is not.
If a submission can be set aside for a missing form or a page overrun, the compliance layer is the job and everything else is secondary. We will tell you that on the scoping call, before you pay for the wrong track — including in the case where it means quoting you the higher government floor rather than the lower one.
None of those signals present? Then a compliance matrix would be theatre, and we do not sell it. The work is the buyer's decision, the structure of your number, and a scope that still means something after the contract is signed. See the government track if you are not sure which one you have.
The same method,
minus the compliance layer.
Commercial work runs on the identical production method as the government track: one source document rendered to PDF and DOCX, automated checks that can fail the build, a visual pass on the rendered pages, and a human review before anything reaches you.
What drops away is the matrix and the gate list, because there is no issuer imposing them. What stays is the part that matters in both tracks: no claim without a basis. If you have not done a thing, the document does not say you have — and a check that specifically hunts for unearned past tense runs against every draft, because that is the sentence that quietly appears when a document is trying to sound impressive.
The full walk-through, including the eight automated checks and why each one is itself tested against an input that must trip it, is on the method page.
Read the full methodOur one reference engagement is a public-sector one. It is a municipal airport food and beverage concession bid — 84 pages across five volumes, produced in 8h 37m from first file to last, with the technical volume landing exactly at its 30-page cap and 18 questions filed to the issuer during the question window. That bid has not been decided. We are showing production, not a win, and we are not going to dress a government engagement up as a commercial case study.
Scoped on a call,
quoted as a fixed price.
There is no price list here, because a single-deliverable statement of work and a multi-phase programme proposal are not the same job and pricing them identically would mean overcharging one of them.
Tell us who the buyer is, what you are proposing, and when it has to be in front of them. Maui — the consultant who runs intake — calls you, works through the decision criteria, and quotes one fixed number before anything starts.
How is this different from buying a proposal template?
A template gives you a structure with your buyer removed from it. The work here is the part a template cannot do: reading what this particular buyer is deciding, what they are afraid of, who else has to approve it, and what the alternative to saying yes looks like. You do get a reusable template at the end — but as an output of the engagement rather than as a substitute for it.
Do you write the statement of work as well as the proposal?
Yes, and we treat them as one document family. A proposal that wins and a statement of work that cannot be delivered against is a loss with a delay attached. The SOW carries the deliverable list, acceptance criteria, the dependencies you are relying on from the client, and a change-control path so the first out-of-scope request is a conversation rather than an argument. We write commercial documents, not legal advice — where you have contract language from your own counsel, we build around it.
What if our buyer sends a formal RFP instead?
Then it belongs on the government track, and we will say so on the scoping call rather than after you have paid for the wrong thing. The signal is simple: if the buyer has published scored criteria, a due date with a delivery method, required forms, or a page limit, the submission can be set aside on mechanics before anybody weighs the content. That is a different job with a different failure mode.
Can we reuse the proposal for the next client?
That is the point of delivering the editable source alongside the finished document. The parts that stay constant — your approach, your credentials, your terms, your pricing structure — are separated from the parts that must change for every buyer, and the buyer-specific sections are marked so nobody ships the last client's name in the first paragraph.
What does a business proposal cost?
Business proposals start at $750, scoped on a call and quoted as a fixed price. Work begins on a 50% deposit and the 50% balance is due on delivery. There is no price list, because a one-deliverable SOW and a multi-phase programme proposal are not the same job.
Next step
Tell us who has to say yes.
The buyer, what you are proposing, and the date it has to be in front of them is enough to start. Maui calls you to scope it. No charge for that call, and no obligation after it.