Say the number

An RFP without a budget is a job post without a salary.

We’ve all been there with the job application. Competitive salary, it says, whatever that means. You apply anyway, sit two interviews, then discover at the offer stage that “competitive” means you’ll be picking up most of the tab. Weeks spent by both sides to establish an incompatibility that one line would have quickly recognised on day one.

The RFP version is more expensive. Three agencies answer the same brief with no financial scope applied to the work. One prices what the scope genuinely requires. One prices what it guesses will be tolerated. One prices low to buy the relationship. The client is now holding three proposals that answer three different questions, which makes the comparison close to meaningless. Then the fun really begins. Revised submissions. Stripping out all the value add that is now an expensive luxury. Final final final.

A clear budget, even a range, mitigates all of this, succinctly clarifying the shape of what is actually available. Give an agency a number and it designs an experience that aligns to that total. This is the real craft in the work: making a fixed sum go as far as possible without compromise or over-commitment. Withhold it and you risk theatre or a race to the bottom, where nobody ever wins.

The real stickler is that the client pays for the guessing too. In evaluation weeks, in extra rounds, in what could have been the selection of the perfect agency that quietly declined to bid, because it could not justify the pursuit cost against a critical, unknown variable.

Early clarity about money is not a concession. It’s the transparent shortcut that saves everybody a lot of cash.