511. Statement of Work (w/ free template) 🌂
A simple template for working with clients and vendors
Hellooo 👋 So happy to have you here. I’m Kevan. I have spent 15+ years as a head of marketing for some cool tech startups. Now I’ve co-founded a brand storytelling business called Bonfire. We do coaching, advisory, and content. If you identify with creativity and marketing, we’d love for you to join us.
The Statement of Work template that gets us some cool business
* Useful for in-house operators and for us entrepreneur folks
When starting a new business, no one tells you all the different forms and papers and templates and spreadsheets you need. Their necessity just kind of appears, summoned by a client or a prospect or an accountant. In our first six months of Bonfire, we’ve created from scratch:
Invoices
Statements of work
Work samples
One-pagers
Profit and loss statement
Growth model
RFP responses
Expense tracking
For anyone who is doing their own thing — or stockpiling assets for the day you’ll take the leap — I thought I’d share some of these documents as templates for you to borrow and adapt, starting today with a Statement of Work template.
For anyone who is in-house, you can use this Statement of Work as a sample of what to ask for from any vendor or freelancer you’re wanting to work with.
Statement of Work template
Also called a Scope of Work, the Statement of Work document outlines the parameters of a service project and gives both parties a chance to confirm what’s included and what’s not, before going ahead and making the thing official.
When starting to work with a new Bonfire client, we will typically deliver a Statement of Work after a discovery call and once we have a pretty good sense of how we’re all feeling about working together. The goal of the Statement of Work is alignment, not necessarily persuasion. Sometimes there will be a formal RFP process (Request For Proposal) that requires us to include answers to particular expectations of the client so that we can be considered alongside other options. But otherwise, we’re building Statements of Work to solidify an almost-solid deal.
Our boilerplate Statement of Work template includes these elements:
Summary
Goals
Scope of work
Schedule
Fees
Here’s a bit more about each section.
Summary
This section is just a high-level reaffirming of the most important stuff our client said on the discovery call. It’s important to use the client’s language here so that we are all on the same page. If you’re an in-house operator, it’s important to check this section to make sure your soon-to-be vendor understands what you want from the project.
In this summary section, we will call out what’s included in the scope of the project and what isn’t.
Goals
Here is where we’ll aim to get very specific about the desired outcomes of the project. Sometimes it might be KPIs like acquisition targets or signups; other times it might be deliverables within certain timeframes. Either way, the important thing is to be super-specific so that you set the right expectations and make sure you know what success will mean for this project.
Scope of work
This part is a bit more open-ended and will depend on what you decide together with the client. We try to list the broad categories for the work we’ll be doing, each with its own bullet point. For instance, there may be a bullet point for strategy, for research, and for data analysis.
Schedule
Typically we will break up the project into phases along with estimated timelines for each. This helps the client wrap their head around the different aspects of the project and how long each will take. Again, a big part of this is about expectation setting and making sure that everyone is comfortable with the timing of the project.
Fees
We’ll often provide some options for payment structure in this section, unless we’ve already aligned on a payment structure on an earlier call. Payment can be one of the last things to finally nail down together, so in the Fees section, we’ll often include different options for the client to consider — even then, the end number is more or less the same, but the way to pay looks a little different, typically either a monthly retainer or an hourly rate up to a certain number of hours. We’ll include language about overages, too.
The end
Signatures! Yay, we’re working together!
Over to you
Is there a common template you use for Statements of Work? Is there anything missing from here that you usually wish to include? Let me know. I’d love to see how you do it!
About this newsletter …
Hi, I’m Kevan, a marketing exec based in Boise, Idaho, who specializes in startup marketing and brand-building. I previously built brands at Oyster, Buffer, and Vox. Now I am cofounder at Bonfire, a brand storytelling company.
Each week on this substack, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world. Not yet subscribed? No worries. You can check out the archive, or sign up below:
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