October 8, 2026
Do proposals need detailed task breakdowns?
Someone asked me this on today’s Ditcherville LIVE call:
“Do proposals need to have detailed statements of work, complete with work package and task breakdown, Gantt charts, and all of that?”
No.
All the stuff people tell you that you need to include to “beef up” your proposals probably won’t even get read.
More importantly, on any non-trivial project, you’ll probably end up not doing a lot of it.
Why?
Because during the early phases you’ll discover that much of what you planned to do at the outset was moot.
So dreaming up task lists and database schemas and deployment automation up front is a waste of time.
Actually, it’s worse than a waste of time. It can sometimes get you in trouble.
As I said on today’s call:
“And then a bean counter comes along at the end of the project and says, ‘You didn’t do these three things listed in the proposal!’ And you say, ‘Well, yeah, because halfway through the project we realized they weren’t necessary.’ And then the bean counter says, ‘Okay, but we’re not paying for them because you said you were going to do them. It’s part of what we paid for, and you didn’t do them.’ I have seen this happen.”
In other words, don’t paint yourself into a corner before you’ve even had a chance to get under the hood.
So what goes in the proposal instead?
The most important thing is this:
How their business is going to be better off after you’re done!
This is the key thing, and most “beefed up” proposals leave it out. They never say how the business will be transformed by the engagement.
They just say, “Look at how much hard-sounding stuff we’re going to do on your behalf! Surely that justifies this huge fee, right? RIGHT?!”
Wrong.
If you leave out the BENEFITS of working with you, you’re basically selling your labor, and it’s left as an exercise for the buyer whether any of the tasks you listed out will leave them any better off than they were before they met you.
Does this result in a proposal that looks different from the usual 50-page “beefed up“ ones that clients are used to?
Yes.
That’s why it works.
Hope that helps!
BTW - This is the kind of question that comes up all the time in Ditcherville LIVE, my group Q&A session for independent consultants who are done trading time for money.
If you’ve got questions like this rattling around in your head, come get them answered:
Hope to see you inside!
Yours,
—J