Repeatable, High-Quality, Low-Effort. Pick Three.
This post is part of our Friday Founder series. A weekly reflection from inside the early days of building We Lead Out. We're sharing what we're learning as we grow a professional services business from the ground up. No polish, no positioning. Just the real stuff we wish more people shared.
I know how to write a good proposal.
I’ve done it in consulting firms with the full machine behind them, where the case studies are pre-approved, the delivery IP is well-worn, and there’s a SharePoint or Confluence page packed with templates, scope blocks, and rates. At We Lead Out, none of that existed yet. So, when we pivoted from business development mode into real solutioning, with workshops booked and proposals due, I found myself facing a familiar task with no infrastructure.
The shift wasn’t just what to propose, it was how. What structure do we want to use? How should pricing flex? What assets do we want to reuse? What does “good” even look like here?
And because we’re not building a traditional consulting business, we’re building an AI-first one, we knew from the beginning that our proposal process had to be more than slideware. It needed to become software.
So as we’ve been writing our first few proposals, we’ve also been designing our proposal-generation agent. It’s early. Human-in-the-loop. But already valuable. It's helping us store reusable content, identify scope patterns, and nudge better language into place. It's not just speeding us up. It’s teaching us how we think.
Soon, that agent will do most of the heavy lifting, pulling in delivery options, scope models, and even generating first drafts. For now, we’re using it to build structured memory and catch repetition across what can still feel like one-offs.
What’s been unsurprising?
It’s slow. Doing this properly, from scratch, takes time. Every estimate, every paragraph, every scope table is being written and designed for reuse. That’s not inefficient, it’s an investment.
What’s been surprising?
How clarifying it is. Every proposal forces us to define the bones of how we work. How we price. How we deliver. How we communicate value. It's not just sales enablement, it's operational design.
And clients can feel it. We’re not just pitching. We’re packaging up real thinking. That level of clarity builds trust, fast.
Takeaway
If you’re building a modern services business, your proposals aren’t just artefacts. They’re product design exercises. Every time you write one, you're shaping your future delivery model. You’re either creating effort… or reducing it.
And if you're serious about scaling, it’s not enough to get good at writing proposals. You need to build the machine that writes them with you.
If you're a founder building your own proposal engine or wondering how AI fits into the sales-to-delivery bridge, we'd love to talk. Always keen to compare notes.
Let’s talk
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