My early nemesis, Business Cards. These days its Business Proposals
When I first went into business for myself, the most painful thing I had to do was learn how to create business cards. I detested the tools and the skills required to build and create and design a business card. In the early years, my business cards were terrible.
I am not being self deprecatory, if anything I am understating what was obvious.
It could easily take me 2 to 3 days to make a business card.
Creating good business proposals for new clients or old clients is also something that is very difficult for me. It is not as difficult as creating a business card used to be before I found Moo Business Cards.
It could easily take me 2 to 3 days to make a business card.
Creating good business proposals for new clients or old clients is also something that is very difficult for me. It is not as difficult as creating a business card used to be before I found Moo Business Cards.
This has less to do with the tools and the systems, and more to do with attempting to apply my mojo into a write up of what I could potentially do with my mojo without giving my mojo away for free.
There is a fine line between explaining what you will do for someone in business, and giving them a free map or plan to execute with a different service provider who doesn’t have to come up with a map or a plan!
I have gotten a lot better at this. I have not gotten faster at it, and I recognize that I need to be able to respond to requests for proposals when new potential clients are primed and ready to do business.
Fast, efficient and effective proposals are essential to closing a deal.
I have relied on a system of creating estimates and Freshbooks. These are typically bullet point driven affairs with very specific line items and costs.
I have also used the Bidsketch proposal system online that connect to Freshbooks. These are typically third-party services I paid an extra $10-$15 a month for those services.
I did not need this service every single month, as some of the work that I did not require a full proposal right up. There are times when writing up a full proposal is detrimental to new business. For small and medium-sized projects or phases of a project, if you send a client a proposal that three or four pages long filled with generic jargon, they are not going to read it.
Sometimes they just need to see the quick list of things that need to be done and how much it will cost.
I closed out my accounts with my previous proposal writing service.
The other day I found a new service that provides free proposals if you only create one to two proposals per month. If you start writing more proposals than that, then the subscription fee would kick in.
This seems to be an ideal fit for me and I intend to give it a test this week, today!
In the future, I also want to get better at incorporating short video snippets into my proposals. Sometimes a few lines of text do not get the point across. However if you can show someone a high definition video of what something will look like or could look like, that conveys pages worth of text much faster for everyone involved.
Fast, efficient and effective proposals are essential to closing a deal.
I have relied on a system of creating estimates and Freshbooks. These are typically bullet point driven affairs with very specific line items and costs.
I have also used the Bidsketch proposal system online that connect to Freshbooks. These are typically third-party services I paid an extra $10-$15 a month for those services.
I did not need this service every single month, as some of the work that I did not require a full proposal right up. There are times when writing up a full proposal is detrimental to new business. For small and medium-sized projects or phases of a project, if you send a client a proposal that three or four pages long filled with generic jargon, they are not going to read it.
Sometimes they just need to see the quick list of things that need to be done and how much it will cost.
I closed out my accounts with my previous proposal writing service.
The other day I found a new service that provides free proposals if you only create one to two proposals per month. If you start writing more proposals than that, then the subscription fee would kick in.
This seems to be an ideal fit for me and I intend to give it a test this week, today!
In the future, I also want to get better at incorporating short video snippets into my proposals. Sometimes a few lines of text do not get the point across. However if you can show someone a high definition video of what something will look like or could look like, that conveys pages worth of text much faster for everyone involved.