We Let AI Write an Entire Month of Captions. The Results Were Exactly What You’d Expect.
We want to be clear about something before this post starts: we use AI. Constantly. It is part of how
There is a version of a proposal that most service businesses send. It is polished. It outlines the scope. It makes confident promises without being too specific. It gives the client something impressive to look at without telling them anything that might create friction.
We sent the other kind.
"The safe proposal protects you from saying the wrong thing. The honest proposal gets you hired by the right client. These are different goals."
We had a prospect. Mid-size business. Good product. Marketing was all over the place. They had come to us after two previous agency relationships that had not gone well. They were skeptical and they had told us so directly.
The standard move is to address the skepticism with a confidence campaign. Show your results. List the credentials. Point out their flaws. Deliver a beautiful deck that says we are different without ever explaining how.
We did something different. We told them exactly what we thought was wrong with their marketing and why. We told them the three things we would not do for them because we didn’t think those things would work. We told them what realistic results looked like in the first 90 days, which was not the number they were hoping for.
And then we told them what we wanted to try, and why we were confident it would work, and what success would look like at 30, 60, and 90 days.
They hired us immediately. No negotiation on price. No follow-up calls. They replied to the proposal email within two hours and said the phrase that has become one of our favorite things a client has ever said: “This is the first time an agency has been honest with us instead of just trying to close us.” And this is why we do what we do.
"The client who needs to be oversold is not your client. The client who is relieved to hear the truth is."
Most service businesses compete on confidence. The honest proposal competes on trust. Trust is rarer and harder to fake, which means when you establish it in the proposal itself, you’ve already differentiated from every competitor who is still competing on confidence.
The honest proposal also filters the wrong clients out before the project starts. A client who needs unrealistic promises to feel comfortable is a client who will be disappointed when reality arrives. Better to know that during the proposal than three months into the engagement.
We were direct about what we saw without being condescending about it. The framing was not “your marketing is bad” but “here’s what we’re working with and here’s how we’d approach it.”
We told them what we wouldn’t do before we told them what we would. This is counterintuitive but it builds enormous trust because it signals that our recommendations are based on what actually works, not on what we sell.
We gave specific timelines and specific metrics. Not ranges. Not “it depends.” Specific numbers with the context for why we chose them.
Every time. Not just with skeptical clients. The honest proposal is always the better proposal because it starts the client relationship with the right foundation. If they hire you after reading the truth, they hired you. Not a version of you that doesn’t exist. In today’s rough economy and market, everyone is getting better at using their wits.
How to write the honest proposal:
→ State what you actually see in their current situation — specifically and without softening it.
→ List what you would not recommend and why. This builds more trust than anything else.
→ Give specific 30, 60, 90 day milestones instead of ranges and qualifiers.
→ Tell them what success looks like realistically, not optimistically.
→ End with exactly what happens next and when. Remove every ambiguity.
"The client who hires you after reading the truth is the client you actually want to work with."
We want to be clear about something before this post starts: we use AI. Constantly. It is part of how
We ran paid ads. They worked reasonably well. Traffic was up. Leads were coming in. It was easy to look