Business documents that need to land — fees by project
I have spent decades inside organisations and inside sentences, and I've noticed the same thing from both directions: a document can be grammatically perfect and still fail completely. It says nothing wrong and persuades no one. That gap — between correct and convincing — is usually invisible from the inside, whether English is a first language or a second one. You can't proofread your way out of it, because there's nothing to circle in red.
This isn't proofreading, and it isn't quite editing in the usual sense either. The work is rewriting the specific documents that carry real consequence — a pitch, a proposal, a board memo, the email you only get to send once — so the argument lands the way you intended it to, for the reader who actually receives it.
That's closer to narrative and case-making than to grammar. The sentences are often the smallest part of the problem. The structure of the argument, the order the reader needs the information in, the line that should open instead of bury — that's where most of the value sits, and it's also where a generic copyeditor can't follow you, because it requires understanding what the document is actually trying to do in the world, not just whether it reads cleanly.
I don't return tracked changes and disappear. The work includes the reasoning behind it — why a passage was restructured, why a certain directness reads as confident in English rather than blunt — so the next document you write yourself is a little closer to this standard already.
Executives, founders, and senior professionals who are fluent in English but whose writing doesn't yet carry the weight their thinking deserves. The documents in question are usually short and disproportionately important: the ones where a deal, a relationship, or a reputation rides on a few hundred words landing correctly.
This isn't the right fit for routine internal correspondence, or for anyone who mainly wants a typo caught rather than an argument sharpened — that's a different, much smaller piece of work, and I'd say so plainly if that's what you actually need.
It starts with the document, or even a paragraph of one, and the context: who reads it, and what you need them to do once they have. From there we agree the scope, the turnaround, and the fee before anything else happens — priced against the document and what's riding on it, not against a word count. Two rounds of revision are built into every project; most documents need at least one conversation about tone or emphasis once you've seen the first draft, and that's not billed as an extra.
Proofreading by an independent set of eyes is then recommended.