the really useful media company

Last week I spent a lot of time writing a proposal for a new client. At the end of the day — after I’d sent it to the client, had a good phone conversation with them to clarify a couple points, and signed off — Emily sent me a link to this 37signals blog post: A reminder of how simple business can be when you don’t make it complicated. Excerpt:

Yesterday I found a [landscaping company] flyer on my front door.

I’ve been staring at a project in my backyard for a few weeks. Staring hasn’t gotten it done. So I figured I’d see what it would cost to have these guys do it.

I called them. 10 minutes later the guy came by. He was down the street on another job. We walked out back. I told him what I needed done. He looked around for 20 seconds and said $300. I said “deal.”

That’s it. No proposal. No “I’ll get back to you tomorrow”. No “Let me see how much the materials will cost and I’ll drop an estimate in your mailbox next week.”

Just $300. Deal. When can you start? Wednesday. How long will it take? A few hours for a few guys.

He knows his business. I know what my time is worth. End of transaction. It was so damn refreshing.

I know everything can’t be done like this, but often it seems like we’ve slid down a path of formality with so many things that really don’t need it. Extensive contracts, delays, red tape, precise cost estimates based on precise amounts of materials, “let me think about it and I’ll get back to you,” etc. Essential? Sometimes yes, but most of the time probably not. [...]

The whole post and quite a few of the comments are well worth reading — funny how it came along at just the right time. I’d sweated over certain parts of the proposal, gotten feedback from several more experienced freelancer friends, contract advice from a lawyer in my family and thought through the implications of each piece in the pie very carefully. In the end, I think the proposal was the right length: it had the details the client had asked for and the information I thought they needed to know.

Of course, not all proposals can be short. Very large corporate sites may need a more precise definition of scope. Responses to open RFPs (request for proposals) have to show that you understand the clients’ needs since they don’t know you from Adam. It’s all about context: if you’ve worked with the client before and/or you’ve covered all the bases in a conversation, your proposal can be a one paragraph email. These two comments to the 37signals post summed it up well:

Know your craft, and you can communicate what you need to the client with a minimum of effort, and everyone is happy.

A short chat about the basic terms (time, cost, and scope); mutual trust; and, communication – that’s about all that is needed in most cases.

All of a sudden, two months have gone by since South by Southwest 2009, and my grand plans for a series of posts about what we learned there have gone poof. That being said, I’d like to share the one session I attended that’s stuck with me the most: From Freelance to Agency: Start Small, Stay Small, which featured a group of top-notch freelancers talking about their lessons learned as they grew their businesses, whether they ended up hiring employees or stayed solo. If you listen to the podcast all the way to the Q & A, you’ll hear yours truly asking a question. Here’s the panel description to give you a taste:

The web has always attracted mavericks and entrepreneurs, and a rocky economy makes the freelance life more desirable (or at least more inevitable) than ever. So what happens when your freelance business starts to grow? How big can you get without getting bad? How can freelancers and small teams compete with traditional agencies? Hip freelancers and cool agency heads will answer questions, compare experiences, and tell their stories.

So what stuck with me? Be yourself. Whether your website speaks in a “we’re a company” voice or an “it’s just me” voice, be honest about the scale of your business, who you are, and what you do. You can have it both ways, as Jeffrey Zeldman pointed out: present yourself as a business on the Home page, introduce yourself as a person on your About page.