Laura’s Winning Ideas

“Only thing we have to fear, is fear itself.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt, Inaugural Speech 1933

This holiday week I had a proposal due. (Doncha’ just love those RFPs that land so close to the holidays?)

A young gal who works for me was sent to start copying pages at Kinko’s, while I finished pulling together pages.

I didn’t give her much instruction, and she didn’t call with questions, so I was surprised when I arrived and found that she’d copied every page on a color copier at six times the cost per page of a laser copier.

We were mostly finished, and the remaining pages had color, so I decided we would continue copying on the same machine and began collating the pages she’d completed.

However, she was upset by her mistake, realizing it was a costly error. (360 pages so far)

And then she began making more errors: punching holes on the wrong side of pages, copying double-sided pages to single sided versions, etc.

Her fear overtook her and created more errors. Now it got really expensive, throwing away color copies we couldn’t use. (586 pages final count)

How often do we let fear overtake us, thinking we are working harder, but actually just making a bigger mess?

Reset

We each need to find our reset button.

1. How do you know when fear is taking hold? Do you know what it feels like in your gut? Do you need to find this feeling so you can realize when you are entering this troublesome arena?

2. When fear is taking hold, how do you reset yourself? What kind of break will work for you in your environment? A quick walk around the block, a break for coffee, a walk to the mailroom, a break for the restroom and fresh lipstick (no George, not you.)?

Fear is rampant among proposal teams. Sometimes we catch it from anxious, anxiety ridden project managers whose jobs may be on the line. More often we self inflict the wound because we all take our responsibility very seriously.  

This young lady is so fortunate. She has a crystal clear idea of what fear feels like for her. She also knows how much disaster it causes, because she had no problem with the tasks until the fear took control. She has living proof that  the “only thing we have to fear, is fear itself.”

Once we have this knowledge, we are powerful beyond measure.

TECHNOLOGY ALERT from The Wall Street Journal.
Dec. 18, 2007

Best Buy’s quarterly profit soared 52% amid strong sales of videogame consoles, laptops and flat-panel TVs and less discounting than last holiday season. The company said its profit margin benefited from a “more rational” retail environment, especially in the home theater segment. Revenue rose 17% to $9.93 billion, thanks in part to the opening of 127 new stores. Same-store sales rose 6.7%, which included a 2.5 percentage-point gain from an extra week of post-Thanksgiving sales versus a year earlier. U.S. same-store sales climbed 6.1%.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119798557779536701.html??mod=djemalertTECH

I’m not surprised by these results, in fact I’m very pleased. I like to hear Best Buy is doing well because they did well by me this year. Considering the great treatment I got, management is doing something right in encouraging an atmosphere that causes us to open our wallets wide.

In my case, both the Geek Squad agents  and the store managers helped me salvage my business from a computer disaster when we had a crash and were forced into purchasing a Windows Vista machine in that dark few weeks when retailers were not allowed to sell XP machines.

I’ve liked Best Buy in the past, but now I’m an evangelist for them. No doubt I’m in good company.

Funny how profit follows fearless support for customers.

In your past performance database, you should be capturing more than the dry recitation of facts about your firm’s success. DIG for the story behind the facts. The Wall Street Journal is obligated to report facts. You have the luxury of putting a face on the numbers by sleuthing for the story behind the numbers.

You can tell when there is a good story because the technical staff want to talk about the project. Play roaming cub reporter and ask questions to find the story behind the numbers.

You’ll use these stories in a sidebar if there isn’t room in the project experience section of your proposal. And storytelling strengthens the cultural bond in your firm. Storytelling warms teams up like a campfire. Collect stories and help spread them around. It will do your culture good, and reinforce the best your firm has to offer.

We learn more about how to succeed from storytelling about folks accomplishing great things, than any amount of training. We learn to be fearless in the face of looming deadlines and threatening obstacles.

Support Good People Doing Great Things

“The internet? Oh yeah. that’s what we use to shop from work.”

It seems to me that those who must work virtually are already doing so and using  technology to enhance their virtual realm. The rest of the world seems to be continuing (or trying) to work the same way they always have.

Are we creating a two class society of workers?

I’m not talking about unskilled and skilled labor — or maybe I am. Last year I called new prospects with an offer for a free virtual workshop of one hour to try out my services. The gap between the virtually skilled and the unskilled was pronounced.

 The gap is obvious.

I was using simple technology: a conference call with a Powerpoint file emailed ahead of time. The unskilled had never done anything like this and it took some handholding to get things set up. The skilled scoffed at using such primitive methods when they are accustomed to using intranet server-based tools on a routine basis. Subscribers to this blog are among the skilled in the virtual realm. [If you aren't a subscriber, you can subscribe several ways (email: easy, RSS feed: for the more sophisticated). Read the post on the right side of my blog to subscribe] The unskilled may have heard of a blog, but have never read one.

History repeats itself.

At one point, a high school education put a worker on track for great things. Then, a college degree was the ticket to a future free of manual labor. Now, the virtually adept can work globally, while the virtually amateur are relegated to small firms limited to a local market.

The invisible class

The virtual workers become invisible to the unskilled. We work anywhere and when the unskilled don’t see us trekking to the office, or haven’t ever heard of our company (because we are a satellite office) they think we aren’t gainfully employed.

And the unskilled become invisible to the virtually skilled. I know more about the individuals with whom I commune on-line than almost any group I know “in reality.” Folks without an email address are invisible to me, and folks who aren’t comfortable communicating virtually become invisible quickly.

Career Consequences

The limitations this causes for proposal professionals are austere. If you work for a company that doesn’t work virtually, you won’t develop the virtual skills necessary to work with firms in the virtual realm. There is a distinct line between the career opportunities offered in the virtual realm and in the locally-based realm. The income difference for proposal coordinators with 5 years experience in my experience is between 25 to 40%. The biggest difference in skills is whether you work virtually or not.

GBC is best known to proposal teams as the comb-binding folks. Their binding equipment is ubiquitous in most proposal centers. As well it should be, they are the world leader in Bindery.

I had the chance to interview Greg Koperna of GBC last week and catch up on the latest ways they have to make a good impression.

As sponsors of the SMPS  Chapter meeting in Detroit, they displayed all their latest promotional materials for branding campaigns. Some of them were sexy attention-getters. Lots of attractive packaging for brochures, CD and DVD holders, and complete branding campaigns for firms. Of course, branding campaigns are focused on the firm, and getting the image perfect, means getting a luxurious schedule.

However, GBC knows proposals have different requirements than branding campaigns:

• Speed of binding (since we often are binding after hours and within minutes of the last overnight delivery drop),
• Ease of last minute changes,
• Ease of reading (i.e. needs to lay flat) 

We still need the same professional treatment, and want to make a great impression, but we are under the gun to produce a large document that meets the client’s specifications.

I asked Greg what they had for proposal professionals that was new.

In addition to plastic comb binding, GBC supplies wire spiral binding (I use this on some of my own proposals) and their latest product is called Pro-click.

Pro-click has a look similar to spiral wire binding, but the ease of last minute substitutions so common when finishing a proposal, and it lays flat for easy reading.

For documents requiring good security, Vela binding is a good secure binding that prevents page substitution. This is good for legal documents. Sometimes I use Vela binding for addenda that are legal backup we don’t want to take a chance on binding in a three ring binder or comb binding.

These folks work throughout the US and Canada.

Greg and I talked about the SMPS meetings he has been attending and he always comes away with a nugget. His last meeting included a speaker who is a procurement officer and they reminded everyone that they want to hear plenty about the team of folks who will actually do the work, and not so much about the bigger picture of the firm.