Why I'd rather meet you for a coffee than email a proposal

I’ve never sent a forty-page proposal in my life, and I’m not about to start.

You know the ones. Glossy PDF, fourteen pages of “about us” before they get to anything useful, a “discovery phase” that’s really just a meeting wearing a fancier name, and a price hidden at the back so you have to scroll past three case studies to find it. The whole thing engineered to look expensive enough to justify the number.

I’d rather just meet you for a coffee. And that’s not me being folksy for the sake of it; the coffee genuinely works better, for you more than me. Here’s why.

You can’t brief what you don’t know yet

Most people don’t actually know what they need from a website when they start looking. That’s not a criticism, it’s completely normal. You know your business inside out and websites… less so. So when an agency hands you a brief form to fill in, you’re guessing, and they’re quoting off your guesses.

Half an hour over a coffee and I’ll have asked you the questions you didn’t know mattered. What actually makes you money. What your best customers have in common. The thing you’re quietly embarrassed about on your current site. You can’t put any of that in a form field, but it’s exactly what shapes a website worth paying for.

A proposal hides the person; a coffee doesn’t

Here’s the slightly uncomfortable truth about a slick proposal: it’s a sales document. It’s built to make a decision feel safe by burying it in process and polish. Fine if you’re buying enterprise software. But you’re not. You’re choosing a person to build something that matters to your business.

You should get to size that person up. Are they listening, or just waiting for their turn to talk? Do they actually get your business, or are they reaching for the same template they pitched the last three people? You’ll learn more about that in ten minutes across a table than in forty pages of PDF.

I’m not trying to scale, and that’s rather the point

This is the bit a big agency would never put in writing. Meeting every potential client for a coffee does not scale. It’s “inefficient”. It’s precisely the sort of thing you cut when you’re trying to process a hundred leads a month.

But I’m not processing a hundred leads a month. I’m a small Oxfordshire studio, and I take on the work I can genuinely do properly. Which means I can afford to do the unscalable thing, and the unscalable thing happens to be the one that actually serves you: turning up, in person, and giving a damn about the result.

The local bit makes it easy

Being based in Didcot and working across Oxfordshire means “let’s grab a coffee” isn’t a polite euphemism for a Zoom call with the camera off. I can come to you. See your shop, your office, your workshop. Meet the people. Get a feel for the thing I’m about to represent online, which is hard to do down a video call.

And it pays off long after launch. When the site’s live and something needs tweaking next spring, I’m still a short drive away, not a support ticket in a queue on another continent. If you’ve ever wondered how much a website actually costs, a fair chunk of the value is in that: the person who built it still being around, and still remembering why.

So, the coffee’s on me

If you’re weighing up a new website and you’d sooner talk to a human than fill in a form, that’s exactly how I like to work. Book a free chat, or start a project enquiry and we’ll find a time. Bring the half-formed ideas and the “is this a stupid question” questions. Especially those.

I’ll get the flat white in.