Unpaid work before the work: quotes, pitches and samples

The options around unpaid pitching are set out side by side below, with the conditions that genuinely favour one over the other.

The hours nobody invoices

Enquiries, calls, scoping, written quotes and follow-up all consume time that never appears on any invoice. For a small job the pre-sale effort can approach the size of the job itself, which quietly halves the effective rate.

People who feel they are working constantly for modest income are frequently spending most of their week on work they never sold. The first useful step is measuring it for a month, because almost nobody guesses this number correctly. Once measured, it becomes a cost to be priced into the rate rather than an unexplained shortfall at the end of the month.

Conversion rate is the number that matters

If one enquiry in four becomes a job, every won job carries the cost of three that did not. Improving the rate is usually more valuable than improving the price, because it removes wasted hours rather than adding revenue to a leaky process.

Where it helps most, qualifying early is how it improves: asking about budget, timescale and decision-maker before writing anything long. A short conversation that ends an unsuitable enquiry is a success, though it rarely feels like one at the time. Tracking where enquiries come from also shows which sources produce work and which produce only conversation.

Where a test becomes free labour

A brief sample that demonstrates capability is a normal part of some markets and costs an hour or two. A task specified against a real brief, with a real deadline, producing output the client could use is a job with no fee attached. The test is whether the client could deploy the result, since anything usable is work regardless of what it is called.

The useful part is this: offering a paid trial task at a reduced fee separates serious buyers from those collecting free output, and serious buyers rarely object. Where a competition or pitch process asks several people for finished work, the economics are simply poor and declining is a reasonable business decision.

Quotes that cost less to produce

A reusable structure with a scope section, an exclusions section and a price removes most of the drafting time from each quote. Standard terms, a standard timescale and a small library of previous work turn an afternoon into half an hour. Keep the detailed workings private and present a single figure, because an itemised breakdown invites line-by-line negotiation.

Where it helps most, state an expiry date on the quote, which prevents old prices resurfacing months later when your costs have changed.

Log what you quoted and what happened, since the pattern across a year tells you where your pricing sits in the market.

Discovery as a paid stage

Where scoping genuinely requires substantial work, selling it as a small paid piece is both fair and commercially sensible. The output is a specification the client owns and could take elsewhere, which is what makes it worth paying for. It converts the riskiest unpaid stage into revenue and gives you the information needed to price the main job accurately.

On an ordinary week, clients who will not pay for scoping often will not pay properly for delivery either, so it functions as a filter. Where the paid discovery leads to the full job, crediting part of the fee against it is a reasonable gesture that costs little.

None of this is a substitute for talking to a clinician if something feels wrong.

Knowing when to walk away

Enquiries that arrive with no budget, an urgent deadline and a request for detailed proposals rarely convert into good work. Repeated requests for revisions to a quote, before any commitment, predict how the project itself will run. Declining early preserves capacity for work that pays, and capacity is the scarcest resource in any small operation.

In practice, saying no politely and leaving the door open costs nothing and occasionally produces a better enquiry later. The hours saved are the whole point, because unpaid hours are the largest hidden expense in most side businesses.

Side by side

The takeaway

Measure your unpaid pre-sale hours for a month, then price them in or cut them out.

Pick the one that costs you least, and let the rest wait.