You personally write the scope narrative on every bid, roughly 6 hours a week, and it has to happen whether or not there is time for it.
In your words. "I'm the only one who can write it so it doesn't sound like a robot wrote it. My estimator gives me the numbers, and then I sit down Sunday night and turn it into something a general contractor will actually read."
What it costs when it slips. Bids go out late, and you said you have walked away from two or three a year purely because you ran out of runway to write them properly. You also mentioned the ones you rush read differently, and you believe it shows.
Why this one and not the others. We talked about scheduling, about the service call intake, and about invoicing. Those are real. This one comes first because it is the only task on the list that you personally cannot hand to anyone, it recurs every single week, and it sits directly on top of revenue. Fix this and the others get easier to look at.
There is no product to buy for this. I looked. The tools that exist either write generic construction proposals that sound exactly like the robot you are trying to avoid, or they are full estimating platforms that would mean replacing software your team already knows.
What works here is a system built specifically for how you bid. It reads the line items your estimator produces, references the last several proposals you won, and drafts the scope narrative in your voice and your structure. You get a complete first draft instead of a blank page. Your Sunday night becomes twenty minutes of editing rather than two hours of writing.
| Detail | What it means for you |
|---|---|
| What it costs | $20 a month for the underlying Claude subscription. There is no separate software fee, because this gets built rather than bought. |
| What it connects to | Your estimating output and a folder of past proposals. It does not touch your accounting, your scheduling, or anything customer-facing. |
| Where your data goes | Your proposals and estimate data are processed by Anthropic. On the $20 individual plan, model training is opt-out rather than off by default, so turning it off in Privacy Settings is part of the setup and I will do it with you. If you have GCs with confidentiality terms that need a stronger commitment, the business tier excludes training contractually rather than by setting, and I will tell you when that is worth the difference. |
| Realistic time to working | Two to three working sessions. Most of that time is testing it against bids you already submitted and correcting what it gets wrong, which is where the quality actually comes from. |
I looked at two alternatives. Off-the-shelf construction proposal software solves document assembly, which is not your problem, since your estimator already produces clean numbers. Your problem is the narrative on top. And a general writing assistant with no context would produce exactly the generic language you said you are trying to avoid, which is why the reference proposals matter more than the tool.
Three things, honestly. If your past proposals are inconsistent in structure, the drafts will be inconsistent too, and we would spend the first session sorting out which ones represent how you actually want to write. This will not replace your judgment on scope exclusions or anything where you are making a risk call, and it should not; those still need you. And the most common failure with something like this is that it gets built and then quietly abandoned, usually because the first draft was disappointing and nobody went back to fix it. That risk is real and it is why testing against real past bids matters more than the setup.
Pull together the last five proposals you won and felt good about. Not the biggest jobs, the ones where the writing landed. That is the reference material any version of this depends on, whether you build it yourself or I do.
While you are at it, time next Sunday properly. You said six hours; owners are usually within an hour either direction, and knowing the real number is worth having regardless of what happens next.
Getting a Claude account takes ten minutes. Getting it to write like you takes longer, and that gap is the entire job.
| Step | What it involves |
|---|---|
| Capture how you write | Working through your winning proposals to identify the structure, the phrasing you reuse, and the things you always include that nobody told you to. |
| Connect the inputs | Getting the estimator's line-item output into a form the system reads consistently, every time, without reformatting by hand. |
| Test against real bids | Running past bids through it and correcting what comes out wrong. This is where most of the time goes and it is what separates a draft you can use from one you rewrite. |
| Hand it over | Making sure you, or whoever ends up running it, can use it without me on the call. |
Everything in this brief is yours. Start with the five proposals and build from there. If you get stuck or want a second opinion later, the door is open and there is no clock running.
I do the work in section 05 alongside you, and it is drafting real bids by the end of our second session. One job, start to finish, with a written definition of done we agree on first. If it is not working, you do not pay.
| Included | Not included |
|---|---|
| The proposal drafting job described in this brief | Scheduling, intake, invoicing, or any other job |
| Capturing your voice, connecting the inputs, testing against your real past bids | Changes to the agreed definition of done once work begins |
| Working by the end of the second session or the fee is refunded | Ongoing operation, monitoring, or maintenance |
| One round of revisions after handover | Training beyond the person who runs it |