It’s usually late when it happens. The proposal is written, the descriptions are as good as you can get them, you’ve gone back and adjusted the wording on the second page twice, and everything is there except one thing.
The number.
And you sit for a minute with the cursor at the bottom of the page, and then you write the figure, and then you keep typing. Because the figure on its own looks so bare sitting there. So you add a sentence after it to soften the landing, and you press send, and you feel a small relief that’s actually nothing to do with the work being finished.
This month has been about seeing the value in what you make. The four things people are actually paying for. Why the part that comes easily to you is usually the most valuable thing you do. What really happens when somebody puts your price next to somebody cheaper.
This is the last piece, and it’s the practical one, because all of that seeing has to arrive somewhere. It arrives on a page. And what I’ve watched happen, over and over, is a creative doing all the work of understanding her own worth and then undoing a good part of it in the final line of a document.
The sentence at the bottom
I did it for years, so I know it well.
Mine went something like this: the total would be around £8,000, but we could potentially adjust things if needed.
It’s worth reading that slowly, because there’s a great deal going on in it.
Around. Potentially. If needed. We could adjust.
Four separate hedges in one short sentence, and every one of them was me apologising before anybody had objected to anything. What I was actually saying was, I’ve told you a number and I’m already uneasy about it, so please know I’ll come down if you’d rather.
And people are perceptive. They read it. Not consciously, mostly, but they pick up the wobble underneath the words, and then they do the entirely reasonable thing that the sentence has invited them to do, which is ask whether there’s any movement.
So the negotiation was already in my own document. Nobody had to start it. I’d written it in myself, on a Tuesday evening, out of nerves.
Everything that comes before it
What changed wasn’t the number. For a long time I assumed the answer was to get braver about the figure itself, and that was never it.
What changed was everything in front of it.
The first page of every proposal after that wasn’t a price, and it wasn’t a list of what I’d be making either. It was their own vision, written back to them in their own specific words. Something like: you chose this venue because your grandmother was married here, and you want your guests to feel that same sense of timeless romance.
Nothing about flowers. Nothing about me. Just the thing they had told me, said back plainly, so that the first thing they read was the feeling of having been properly heard.
That page was doing real work. By the time somebody reached the rest of the document, they had already seen that I understood what they were buying, which was never the arrangements. It was the walking in.
Then the middle changed too. I used to itemise everything, line by line, almost stem by stem, because it felt transparent and thorough and I thought it was the generous thing to do. But an itemised list hands somebody a pen. It turns one decision into fifteen small ones, and each of those fifteen lines is a place where a perfectly sensible person begins wondering whether that particular bit is worth it, or whether it could be a little smaller.
So I grouped instead. Not vaguely, and not to hide anything. Groups that each described a complete thing: everything to do with arriving and the ceremony as one; everything to do with the room they would eat in as one. Each group described what it would create, and then carried a single figure.
Which is much closer to what people are choosing anyway. Nobody is buying eleven buttonholes. They’re buying the moment their guests walk in.
And one more small thing from those documents, because it says something about what a proposal is for. Clients nearly always wanted to show the designs to somebody who hadn’t been at the meeting, a mother or a sister or a partner, and a document full of private details and figures is an awkward thing to forward on. So I started sending two copies. The full one, and a second with the designs and the descriptions and none of the private details, made to be passed around. Nobody asked me for it, and it took about ten minutes, and it meant the thing going round the family was the work rather than a number lifted out of context by somebody who hadn’t been part of the conversation.
One sentence for the number
And then the number itself.
The total investment for what you’ve described is £15,000.
That’s the whole sentence. No around. No paragraph in front of it explaining how much goes into the work, no line afterwards about how I do appreciate it’s a lot, no hint tucked in beside it that there might be some flexibility. Just the figure, in the same tone of voice I’d use for the delivery date.
Because a price is information. It isn’t a request, and it isn’t an opinion for somebody to weigh against how confident the writer sounds about it. And the way it’s written down tells the person reading it which of those things you believe it to be.
This holds just as well if what you sell is a product rather than a service, because the shape is identical and only the surface changes. Your proposal is your product page, or your reply to a commission enquiry, or your line sheet. The vision page is still there, it just sits above the price rather than in a separate document: before anybody reaches a number they’ve read where the clay comes from, how many survive the kiln, that it’s finished by hand and that’s precisely why no two match. The grouping is still there, in a collection sold as a set and described by what it does on a table, rather than six things priced separately and compared one against another. And the price sentence is still there, which on a page means the number simply sits, without a paragraph underneath explaining why it costs what it costs and without a crossed-out figure beside it.
And then nothing
The last part is the hardest, and it takes about three seconds.
Say the number, or send it, and then stop.
Three seconds of quiet feels very long indeed when you’re the one who has just said a figure out loud, and the instinct to fill it is overwhelming. With the justification. With and of course that includes. With but obviously we can have a look at that.
Everything added into that gap makes the number smaller. Not literally, not at first, but it tells the other person that you don’t quite believe it can stand up on its own.
For a product business the quiet has its own version, which is the follow-up you don’t send. You give the number, and then you leave it alone. You don’t come back two days later with a gentler figure and a reason.
And what I found, once I finally managed it, is that the quiet is almost always much shorter than it feels. Two or three seconds, most of the time. And what comes back is very often not about the money at all. It’s when would you need to know by.
The conversations moved after that, and it wasn’t dramatic. Instead of the reply coming back about the price, it came back about the date. Whether I was free. When they’d need to confirm. Whether I might do their sister’s wedding in the spring as well. And the people who did say it was more than they’d planned said it kindly, and several came back later, and quite a few sent somebody else.
I don’t think I ever got braver. I got clearer, and then the document did the work I’d previously been trying to do with my own voice in an awkward moment, which I was never any good at.
There’s something worth doing before the next price of yours goes out, and it takes about a minute.
Write the price sentence first, on its own, before anything else around it. One sentence. The number, stated as a fact. Nothing in front of it and nothing after it.
Then read it out loud, once, to nobody at all. That part matters more than it sounds, because a hedge is far easier to hear than it is to see.
The value was always there. That’s what all four of these pieces have been about, really. It was there before you could see it, and now you can, and the last part is simply letting it be seen by the person in front of you, without a single word of apology attached.
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