Every project that went sideways went sideways at the brief. The writing came out fine. The direction was fog from day one, and fog is expensive.
So I stopped trusting kickoff calls and started sending one template before I quote anything. It fits on a single page. Here is the whole thing.
The fields
Who is this for? One person, described the way you would describe them to a friend at lunch. “Owners of older homes in Omaha with failing furnaces” beats “residential and commercial clients.”
What should they do after reading? One action: call, book, reply, buy. Two answers here means the copy will chase two jobs and catch neither.
What are they worried about? Price, timing, mess, being upsold. Fear names the objections your page has to answer out loud.
What proof do you have? Numbers, years, names, photos, guarantees. I cannot write proof I do not know exists.
What do competitors claim? Paste three rival headlines into the brief. That is how we make sure yours sounds like you instead of like them.
What words does the client use? Exact phrases from sales calls and reviews. Copy should sound like the company sounds on its best day.
What has been tried and abandoned? Previous pages, previous writers, previous promises. Knowing what failed saves us both a second lap around the same track.
Watch what a bad answer looks like, because the brief is also a filter. “Who is this for?” answered with “anyone who needs our services” tells me the client hasn’t chosen a customer yet, and no draft fixes a business that hasn’t chosen. Before: “anyone with a home.” After: “empty-nesters in the western suburbs selling the family house within a year.” Now I know which fears to name and which words to use.
Why one page
A six-page brief gets skimmed and half-filled. Readers skip around on screens and hunt for the parts that matter, the same skimming pattern that eye-tracking research at the Nielsen Norman Group has documented for years. A one-page template respects that from both ends: the client fills it fast, and I find what I need in one pass.
I once received a six-page brief, fully filled in, with eleven attachments. The three lines that mattered sat on page four, halfway through a paragraph about company values. That’s the failure mode: the answers that shape copy buried under the ceremonial ones. My template puts them at the top, where nothing can hide them.
Then I draft against the brief and tag every claim with its source line. Two minutes of shared clarity saves two rounds of “hmm, that’s not quite us,” which is the most expensive sentence in this business.
Fill mine in tonight and send it back before we talk price. Half the projects that “need more discovery” are projects that needed a filled-in brief.