Business / Authored KEVOS® book
Win Work You Can Deliver
A practical guide to enquiries, viable offers and customer commitments
Build a small business pipeline around evidence, viable pricing and reliable delivery, with a continuous worked example and practical exercises.
Start reading →About this book
A full enquiry list can hide an unworkable business. Some customers need something you cannot deliver. Some attractive projects consume more time than their prices allow. Other opportunities are worth pursuing, but disappear because nobody records the next decision or carries the promise into the work.
This book follows an opportunity from its first evidence to the review after delivery. It connects customer conversations with pricing, capacity, cash timing and practical follow-through. The aim is to help a small business choose better work and make promises it can keep.
The ten chapters use Fieldnote Studio, a fictional service business, as a continuous example. Every customer, amount and result in that case is invented for teaching. They are not KEVOS® projects, prices or claims of performance. Exercises produce a small set of useful working records rather than a large sales manual.
Read in order to build the complete method, or use the contents to revisit a decision. Financial examples use Australian dollars and exclude GST unless stated. The book provides general business education, not a contract template, professional legal advice or a promise of sales results. Apply relevant local requirements and obtain qualified advice where the consequences warrant it.
An independent treatment
Charlie Pidcock’s Managing Your Opportunities workbook helped identify the value of preparation, questioning, listening and sustained customer relationships. The workbook is mainly prompts for a facilitated workshop. This book does not supply purported answers to its blanks or reproduce its training programme. The chapter sequence, explanations, decision records and numerical examples are independently developed for KEVOS®. Current public guidance is cited where legal or operational claims require it.
Who this book is for
Owner-operators, small service businesses and new sales leads who need to choose worthwhile work, make clear offers and carry customer promises through to delivery.
What you will learn
- Separate customer evidence from assumptions before investing in an offer.
- Evaluate the contribution, capacity and cash timing behind a proposed sale.
- Write a clear proposal and maintain a pipeline based on observable decisions.
- Transfer promises into delivery and use customer outcomes to improve the next offer.
Contents
- 01Decide which work deserves a yes
Define a worthwhile opportunity using customer outcomes, delivery capability and commercial limits before you fill a sales pipeline.
- 02Test a customer problem before building an offer
Use observation, interviews and bounded pilots to test a customer problem without mistaking polite interest for dependable demand.
- 03Build a route to enquiries you can maintain
Choose manageable ways to reach suitable customers, measure useful responses and account for the time spent creating each opportunity.
- 04Turn a conversation into a decision record
Explore the customer's situation, distinguish facts from assumptions and agree the information and actions needed for a sound decision.
- 05Price the promise, including the work around it
Test a proposed price against delivery effort, contribution, available capacity and the timing of cash receipts and payments.
- 06Make the offer easy to assess
Translate a customer decision record into a clear offer covering outputs, responsibilities, price, timing, acceptance and changes.
- 07Run a pipeline that tells the truth
Use observable stages, clear next actions and comparable groups of enquiries to separate promising work from commitments and cash.
- 08Carry the promise into delivery
Transfer the accepted scope into a practical delivery record, manage dependencies and changes, and hand over the agreed result clearly.
- 09Earn the next conversation
Review delivery honestly, handle problems according to their cause and obligations, and make follow-up useful rather than automatic.
- 10Put the system to work in thirty days
Introduce the book's decision records and review habits over four weeks, using real opportunities to improve a small business operating system.
References and source notes
The manuscript and worked examples are original KEVOS® writing. References inform particular concepts; their authors do not endorse this book. Web references were consulted on 13 October 2026.
- Charlie Pidcock. Managing Your Opportunities (undated workbook). Nineteen-page workshop workbook supplied for research. Prompts on communication, preparation and customer relationships informed the subject choice. Its blank exercises, named rules, illustrations and quotations are not reproduced or reconstructed. Publisher and edition are not stated.
- Australian Government, business.gov.au. Do market research (current web guidance). Supports the limited discussion of research methods in Chapter 2. The interview exercise and fictional case are original.
- Australian Government, business.gov.au. Prepare quotes (current web guidance). Further guidance on written quotations and their significance, referenced in Chapter 6.
- Australian Government, business.gov.au. Set up a cash flow statement (current web guidance). Supports distinguishing cash receipts and payments from a profitable-looking sale in Chapter 5.
- Australian Communications and Media Authority. Avoid sending spam (current web guidance). Source for the short Australian electronic-marketing compliance note in Chapter 3.
- Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. False or misleading claims (current web guidance). Source for the short guidance on substantiating business claims in Chapter 6.
- Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. Consumer rights and guarantees (current web guidance). Source for the limits of treating a complaint only as a goodwill decision in Chapter 9.
- Office of the Australian Information Commissioner. Small business (current privacy guidance). Source for checking whether privacy obligations apply, referenced in Chapter 4.
- Australian Signals Directorate, Australian Cyber Security Centre. Small business cyber security guide (January 2025). Further reading for protecting the simple business records described in Chapter 10.
