Where these proposals come from
Private clients have no obligation to issue a call for tenders. A company, a non-profit or a professional office that wants a survey, a diagnosis or an action plan often calls two or three firms it knows, or just one.
The public sector produces them too. A municipality must use a public procedure above a threshold, and a written invitation to at least two enterprises between $25,000 and that threshold. Below $25,000, the Act imposes neither. Each municipality does adopt a contract management by-law that sets its own rules, and publishes it on its website. Before a meeting with a municipal client, read it. It will tell you what form your proposal has to take.
Then there are follow-on mandates, additional mandates and needs discovered along the way. In all these cases there are no tender documents. They are in the client's head, and you have to go and get them.
During the meeting, take the right notes
The meeting notes will serve as your tender documents. They deserve the same care. Here is what is worth writing down, ideally in the client's exact words:
- the problem as they describe it, before you rephrase it
- what triggered the request now (a deadline, a board meeting, a complaint, a grant)
- who decides, who pays, and who will use the deliverable
- the constraints: the date, the budget if it comes up, the data available, the people to consult
- what has already been tried, and why it didn't work
- what a good result would look like in six months
- what worries them, even if only half said
The last line often matters more than the others. A client who mentions in passing that the last consultant "delivered a report nobody read" has just given you their first evaluation criterion.
Rebuilding the grid nobody wrote
Without tender documents, the client still evaluates your proposal. They just do it without a written grid. Your job is to write that grid for them, from the notes.
Take a fictional case. A non-profit with 60 employees wants to survey its members. In the meeting, the executive director said three things: the board meets in May, the last survey had a very low response rate, and several members are afraid of being identified.
The implicit criteria follow: a credible response rate, demonstrated anonymity, a deliverable ready for the May board meeting, a budget suited to a non-profit. The proposal is built on those four points. The approach section explains how you will get responses where the last survey failed. The anonymity section says concretely who will see what. The schedule starts from the May meeting and works backwards.
| In your notes | Implicit criterion | Proposal section |
|---|---|---|
| "The board meets in May." | A deliverable ready for the May board | Schedule |
| "The last survey got very few responses." | A credible response rate | Approach |
| "Some members are afraid of being identified." | Demonstrated anonymity | Anonymity |
| "We're still a non-profit, you know." | A budget suited to a non-profit | Fees |
A generic survey proposal, however good, would answer a question the executive director never asked.
How Clarido does it
A Clarido proposal can start from meeting notes instead of tender documents. You upload or paste your notes, and Clarido draws an analysis of the mandate from them. The first draft starts from that analysis and from your library, meaning your mandates, your résumés and your approaches.
The questionnaire will be emailed to all members, with two reminders a week apart, [À fournir par la firme : format and source of the member list].
Information that neither the notes nor the library provide is marked "[À fournir par la firme : …]" ("to be provided by the firm") instead of being guessed. These are often the questions to ask the client in the validation page.
The structure of a short proposal
A proposal without a call for tenders doesn't need thirty pages. Three to eight pages are enough most of the time, in this order:
- The context, rephrased in the client's words.
- The objectives of the mandate.
- The approach, tied to the implicit criteria.
- The deliverables.
- The schedule.
- The team, with a short bio per person.
- Fees and terms.
- The assumptions made, for everything the meeting did not settle.
The last section protects both parties. If you assume the client will provide its member list in a usable format, write it down. If the client doesn't provide it, the assumption explains the difference in cost or time.
Get it validated before you write
A day or two after the meeting, send the client one page that sums up what you understood: the problem, the objectives, the constraints, the deadline. Ask them to correct what is wrong.
That page costs an hour. It avoids an eight-page proposal built on a misunderstanding, and it shows the client you listened. Their corrections often bring out what the meeting had left in the shadows.
What changes compared with a call for tenders
There are no admissibility conditions to check and no 70-point threshold to clear. There is no transparency either, since you won't know who else was approached or how your price compares.
One rule does not change: the facts. You can reuse sections from past proposals, adapt an approach, reuse a presentation of the firm. The mandates cited, the résumés and the references stay accurate, because a private client can call a reference too.
Sources
- Act respecting contracting by municipal bodies, CQLR c. C-65.01 (updated to August 12, 2026; sections cited in force since April 1, 2026), ss. 7 and 10 (contract management by-law, published on the website), s. 29 (public procedure from the threshold set by regulation), s. 30 (written invitation from $25,000 up to the threshold), s. 80 (invitation sent to at least two enterprises). legisquebec.gouv.qc.ca/en/document/lc/C-65.01
- Regulation respecting the threshold and time periods applicable when awarding certain contracts of municipal bodies, CQLR c. C-65.01, r. 4 (updated to July 1, 2026), s. 3 (the threshold is the minimum threshold set in any applicable intergovernmental agreement). legisquebec.gouv.qc.ca/en/document/rc/C-65.01,%20r.%204