Estimating and Project Support
Proposal Preparation for roofing contractors
Nobody reads your proposal on its own. It is read next to two others, by somebody who cannot judge roofing and is therefore judging paperwork.
A document built to be set beside another
The same structure every time it leaves the office: the same section order, the same units, the same place for the things a homeowner will look for. Consistency is not tidiness here — it is what makes two of your own proposals comparable to each other a year apart.
Exclusions written on the page rather than left to be inferred from their absence. What the price does not cover is the single most useful sentence in the document and the one most often missing from it.
And one live version, dated, with superseded drafts withdrawn. A customer holding two of your documents with different numbers on them will believe the cheaper one, and will be entitled to.
Whatever is easiest to compare wins
A homeowner receiving three roofing proposals has no way to assess any of them on the merits. They cannot tell whether the underlayment specified in one is better than the underlayment specified in another, or whether the ventilation detail on page three matters. What they can do is compare. So they compare whatever the three documents have in common, and in practice that is the total.
This is the trap in writing a good proposal. Adding detail feels like adding value, and it does — but only for the parts the reader can weigh. Everything else becomes background against which the one comparable figure stands out more sharply. A thorough document and a thin document, read side by side by a layperson, differ mainly in price.
The way out is not less information. It is putting the comparable things where they will be compared. If your proposal makes it easy to see that the other one excludes deck replacement, does not mention disposal, and has no answer for what happens when the roof is opened, then the comparison the homeowner runs is the comparison you would want them to run. You have not argued that you are better. You have made the difference visible and let it argue.
Which is why this desk is fussy about structure and indifferent to adjectives. The persuasive work in a proposal is almost entirely organisational.
The page where a monthly figure appears
One part of a roofing proposal is not a presentation choice. The moment a document quotes credit terms, rules attach to how those terms are shown — and they attach to the figure rather than to the paragraph around it. At 12 CFR 1026.24, “If any of the following terms is set forth in an advertisement, the advertisement shall meet the requirements of paragraph (d)(2) of this section”, and the listed terms include “The amount or percentage of any downpayment” and “The number of payments or period of repayment”.
That is a precise and easily missed mechanism. A single payment figure dropped onto a proposal to make a total feel smaller can pull in obligations the rest of the document was not built to carry, and it is typically the line added last, by whoever was closing.
The standard applied to what does get disclosed is also worth knowing, because it is about legibility rather than presence. Under 12 CFR 1026.17, “The creditor shall make the disclosures required by this subpart clearly and conspicuously in writing, in a form that the consumer may keep.” A disclosure shrunk to fit a layout has not been made more elegantly; it may not have been made.
Whether any of this reaches you depends entirely on who is extending the credit, and in most roofing work that is a lender rather than the contractor. This brand is not a creditor, makes no disclosure on anyone’s behalf, and does not advise on which of these provisions applies to your arrangements. The practical rule this desk works to is narrow: whatever your lender supplies goes in as supplied, and a figure that turns up without its accompanying material is queried before the document leaves rather than after.
This describes two federal provisions in general terms. It is not legal advice, it makes no determination about your financing arrangements, your proposals or your obligations, and the answer differs depending on who extends the credit. Those questions belong with your own counsel and your lender.
Where the scope becomes an offer
This desk sits inside Estimating and Project Support, and the department boundary — including where preparation stops and a licensed party takes over — is set out there rather than repeated here. What is particular to this page is the handover it represents: an internal scope becomes a document a stranger will judge you by.
What owners ask after losing a job
We lose jobs to cheaper proposals that are obviously worse. What is going on?
The homeowner is comparing what they can compare. If one document is a total and yours is a total plus four pages, the two are not being read as more and less detail — they are being read as expensive and cheap. Detail only helps once it is organised so that the differences between the two documents become visible. Otherwise it reads as noise attached to a bigger number.
Should proposals be shorter, then?
Not shorter. More legible, which is a different edit. The parts a homeowner can actually weigh — what is included, what is not, what happens if something is found once the roof is open — belong where they will be seen. The parts that exist for you belong further down. Most proposals put those the wrong way round.
Why do you insist on writing down what is excluded?
Because an exclusion that is merely absent is not an exclusion, it is a disagreement waiting for a date. Deck replacement, permit fees, disposal of unexpected material, work on anything that turns out not to be roof — those are the ordinary ones. Saying so costs a sentence and prevents the conversation where a homeowner is genuinely surprised and genuinely aggrieved.
Our salespeople each have their own version. Is that a problem?
It is the most common one. Five versions means no one can tell whether a change was a decision or a typo, and any inconsistency the customer spots reads as carelessness about the work rather than about the document. One template, changed deliberately, is worth more than any individual improvement to it.
Do you write the sales copy?
We prepare the document — the scope as it came from estimating, the inclusions and exclusions, the terms you have decided on, presented consistently. What we do not do is invent claims about the work or about the company to make it land better. If a proposal needs a claim nobody can support, that is a pricing or positioning question and it belongs upstream of this desk.
What about the financing page?
It is the part of a proposal with rules attached, and it is usually assembled last and least carefully. We present whatever your lender provides, as they provide it, and we do not restyle or summarise their disclosures to fit the layout. Where a figure appears without the material around it, that is worth raising before the document goes out rather than after.
The credit provisions quoted here
- 12 CFR 1026.24 — Advertising — Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, via eCFR
- 12 CFR 1026.17 — General disclosure requirements — Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, via eCFR
Put your proposal beside the one that beat it
Read them the way the homeowner did, in the order they arrived. The reason is usually visible in the first thirty seconds.