Pitches and proposals

00:00 Hello and welcome to Perspective. This is a show by founders of small creative agencies giving our perspective on starting our own companies. The aim of this podcast is to provide some useful advice and inspiration to others as well as learn from each other and others we may get to come talk on the show. This is our third episode. My name is John Duck. I'm a director at Every Interaction and with me I have Dan Ghent from Lighthouse London. Hello John. How are you? Yeah, not too bad.

00:27 Fantastic. Last week we spoke about costs and how we go about charging our clients and the natural thing we thought to talk about next might be pitches and proposals. Once we've had our initial conversations with clients, how we take it to the next level and what level of effort we go into to try and win the work, I guess. Just gone through this very recently. We've just had a big pitch the other day, which is an interesting experience. Oh, yep. I guess the first thing to decide is what's your definition of pitching? What do you guys do when somebody comes to you with new business and you start talking about the project. At some point they're going to need something a bit more official. Obviously the purpose of this is to define some parameters around which the project is going to run by, is to essentially justify the costs to some degree.

01:25 What do you guys do and how do you go about it? I just get upset. They're quite different. How would I define between a pitch and a proposal? Yeah. What's your definition and the differences between them? A pitch, I suppose, is like a meeting entirely on their terms, normally carried out the same day as they're meeting a load of other people. Depending on who they are and what their process is, it can be quite structured as to what you've got to say and what you've got to talk about. I think they're horrible. It's a bit high pressure, isn't it? Well, I just don't rate them as a method of choosing who to work with. I think that's my problem with them. I think I have a general problem in business and maybe even in life, which is if I don't think something's...

02:24 If I don't rate something, I literally just am down on it and give it zero effort. And pitches essentially fall into that category because I suppose I've seen the value more of them as I've got more experience, but I used to just be, "We don't pitch. Pitching's broken." I mean, I've sat across to the other side of the table, had pitches to me and just thought, "What are you doing? You losers." But I mean, I suppose in some people's process at a certain level, it's kind of seen as the thing to do, but it feels like a hangover from...

03:13 I think of Mad Men when I think of pitches. It is a bit old school in some respects. And yeah, when it comes to actually pitching, we don't do any actual work, especially creative work of any kind. Obviously, back in the agency days when we were working at the same company, that's what everybody did. In the early 2000s, everyone, you basically did the beginning part of the project and you just jumped straight into doing concepts. You would quite often go in with three completely different design directions and show, "Look what we can do." And the theory behind that was that you're demonstrating what they might get if they choose you. The problem with it is that I think it's pretty throwaway if you do any work for a pitch, because you haven't got the time to do the process properly. You don't have enough time to do any research. If you go through your process properly, doing all the background research you should be doing and all of these experience and information architecture work, you might have to do as well on any kind of testing.

04:18 Nothing's validated. If you just jumped straight into design, do some random concepts that really aren't based on anything other than your own design opinion and what they should do. It's just throwaway and essentially a complete waste of everybody's time. Yeah, I'd love to go to a pitch having done like three months of user experience work and brought it up through the research and maybe just deliver them an entire business solution in front of their eyes. But that kind of spec work pitching is definitely never done that. Oh, maybe I like... I think we gave an idea of what a homepage wireframe might be once or something on request. But no, because yeah, like you say, that's not a serious design process. In fact, these days, spec work's a slightly different issue because it can happen outside of pitching as well, but it's almost something these days, it can flip on its head and basically make out that anyone who does do spec work isn't a serious option. But back then, I suppose that was what everyone else was turning up with. So if you didn't turn up with it, I remember being at the V&A Museum and people would turn up with basically the entire website, like kind of cut out and put on sort of that kind of foam board stuff.

05:49 Yeah, yeah, I remember doing that a lot. It was like, here it is. You'd go in with big foam board printouts, A3 printouts of websites and like just mad men style, flip through them one by one. Pretending to click on them.

06:06 If you click here, it's going to go to this board. I'd like to see that now, get some foam board CSS3 animations going.

06:17 Some transitions, like throw one board out the window, bring the other one in. You can get a hover right now and check foam boardio as a domain and see if it's available.

06:29 But yeah, no, I think the pitching generally, we haven't done it often enough to actually be any good at it. Way too naive at it. You know, if it's a pitch situation, the likelihood of me having the experience or us having the experience to actually go in and do ourselves justice is so low. Like, it's a sales game, really. It's not, you can't go in there and show what you're made of as a designer or a developer. And I always try to. So that's where it goes wrong because you're not, you don't go in and give them the perfect vision. You go in and give them what you think is an interesting dose of reality and how the process might work. And it gets blown out of the water by the next people coming in and BSing everywhere. Yeah, I'm sure there's a lot of that that goes on.

07:35 So when you're winning your work, the people who are coming to you, you're in every situation, you're the only people they're considering? No, not at all. That's pretty rare. Normally, we're a serious option though. And I think that's another thing about this kind of process is that if people have a procurement process which involves needing to see a certain amount of agencies, the likelihood or getting a certain amount of proposals, the likelihood is they probably already have a favourite. Someone they've worked with before. Yeah, just someone they want to give the work to. And I suppose it's kind of like it's always a bit of a warning sign if you're suddenly asked if you'll go in and pitch. So you think that they're just, they've got a preferred favourite.

08:26 They're just doing due diligence in asking a few people to get some other quotes and to see what other options are out there. Yeah. And you're pretty much there to make up the numbers. I think that can be the case. Yeah, I agree. And I think a good question to ask, because obviously, you know, once you've spoken to them, which is going to happen before you go into a pitch or proposal situation, is to actually literally outright ask that. To get a grasp on the situation and what the level of competition is like and whether it's worth you putting in any effort at all, just turn around and straight out ask people, are we here to make up the numbers? Yeah, absolutely.

09:08 If there's like an enormous pause, you probably are. Yeah. I think both of these things we're talking about, pitching and proposals, you almost just want them to be like the last step. Like, that's why pitching is so hard for it to be the last step. It's like most work you win, I feel, you're the one who was the favourite and the others are making up the numbers.

09:39 You know, and you sort of know when you're that person, then so it's just kind of a formality. And if pitching, if you're not going into a pitch and it being a formality, then you've got so little control. We still don't really go for them very often. I mean, I think we may do more as we grow a bit. And maybe it's what the next rung up the ladder looks like in terms of winning work. I don't know. You perhaps work with bigger stuff than we do. So how often are you pitching?

10:15 Most of the time, yeah, I would say. And when I say pitching, I mean, we're not doing any creative work, we're putting a proposal forward. We're going to meet them, we're talking through that proposal and they're talking to other people. Oh, okay. Yes, that's always the case with us.

10:34 Yeah. But I think that even that proposal, I've recently kind of wised up a bit on this. Kind of I've got a little bit into sales, which is, I suppose, not surprising. My dad's a salesman generally, I'm turning to him. And so basically been really trying to work on making the proposal like just the icing on the cake. So essentially, rather than do like a proposal will take me X amount of hours to write. And normally most of that time is spent with me fretting about what I'm putting in it, and going, oh, do we sound good enough and this and that? And have I explained responsive design well enough in this bit? And then I sort of realized that's not really what this thing's for. So what we do now is normally have a meeting. And then if I think that meeting has gone well, they may be asking for a proposal, then actually just get them back together to do a workshop with them. So just like an hour. But in that workshop, I'll basically do like a few little exercises that you'd probably do in a project, maybe in a kickoff meeting.

11:50 But I just sort of bring like mini versions of them into the hour. So basically, one, just get a bit of trust going with them, they go, oh, this person is actually providing value already.

12:04 And two, the answers to those things are basically what goes into the proposal. So if we do an exercise around what marketing channels someone might use. So we get all the marketing channels, put them on the table, which ones do you like, which ones have you tried.

12:19 And to them, it's a way of saying, okay, they're helping me decide how to use my marketing budget. To us, we're just listening to them say to us, we think that content marketing is a good idea.

12:34 And so we can then go, okay, that's going in the proposal. And so you're sort of speaking back to them the things that they think are a good idea. I mean, obviously, as long as you think they're good, I mean, it's not totally cynical. But then for me, like, by the time you're putting proposal in, you feel it's almost just about kind of wrapping it all up and saying, there you go.

13:00 You know, I think I'm leaning a lot less on proposals, mainly because, like I say, I used to use them to try and do the selling. And now I realize that actually, you need to be doing it.

13:13 Yeah, you can't really sell in the proposal. No. And if you try, you end up with a 30 page document that no one's going to read anyway. Completely. So I've stripped right back. I used to do that as well. In fact, when I saw we were talking about this, the first thing that came to mind was we once worked with this charity and the guy came and met us and we had a brilliant meeting with him and we were like, this is this is great. And he said, cool, send me a proposal.

13:46 And we just were a bit busy. So we just we had like this kind of really rambling proposal, sending that over. And he basically rang me up and just had the biggest go at me about it. Like he was genuinely, he was genuinely really upset about how I mean, I can't get this signed off with this.

14:06 Completely. That was it. He was like, he was like, well, you got to understand there's other people here. I've got to show this to you. And he's like, we had such good meeting. And he was like, he took it really personally. And I was just like, he's completely right. It is total rubbish. I was just like, I can't believe we send this to people. It's so like, it's just sort of explained every step of our process way too in way too much detail. Now I basically just go about four or five outcomes.

14:35 So just don't I don't even talk about process anymore, really. It's just like, here's the outcomes based on everything we've heard. And so now when I'm talking to people, I'm just constantly, every time I hear something that they want to happen, I write it down after the meeting, just put them in a file somewhere so that when it comes to proposal, I'm literally spending half the time because I'm just taking each one of those, writing something mildly fluffy about it.

15:01 And then, yeah, sending it over. Yeah. I think we do a reasonably similar thing again. It really depends on the size of the project you're going for. And the bigger the business, you see the more people involved in the decision making process are, and you're not always going to meet them all in advance. So we would never put anything forward without having a meeting first and speaking to them and doing what you said, basically a mini workshop of sorts where we're trying to extract as much information about the project and the brief as we possibly can to get a good handle on what's going on. It's essentially a mini workshop of sorts.

15:38 And talking about possible ideas, you know, the should, would, could's of the project, what they really, what are their priorities and trying to understand what we might put in a proposal for, for the budgets that hopefully they've laid out for us or that they expect us to put forward. But I get a feeling if you're going in for a really big project, I kind of feel like there's a need to put a little bit more effort into the proposal. Like there's some sort of scale, scale to it. Like, you know, this is going to be huge. This, this requires some documentation and bigger companies sometimes, you know, they all, the one we did this week, they hired a specialist to run the whole process. And obviously they had like a big checklist of things that you needed to do and a bit of a little hoops you have to jump through in order to be able to submit the document in the first place. So it required a lot of stuff. So it ended up being 30 odd pages long. And we had a separate deck to go in and present for two hours and talk through everything. So it was a bit of a process, but it'll completely be worth it if we win it. And it's worth putting in the effort for that particular example, just because of the scale of it and the amount of work involved. It makes sense, but for other projects, it doesn't always make sense. And if you're meeting with the key decision makers anyway, you can be a bit leaner with the proposal. And yeah, exactly that. Just put in what is absolutely necessary to seal the deal. Sure. I have this issue too, but how do you know what level to go to in terms of, you know, so that workshop, you could almost call that spec work in a way you're providing value, you're not getting paid. Do you just dish them out or, because several times I've definitely gone to someone just to fill the gap at the end of the meeting. Okay, we'll get your proposal next week. And then God, why not say that? I've got a right proposal now. And, and, and I don't even want to, you know what I mean? But like, how do you like, because it's a bit rude to be like, can we have a proposal? How much money you got? You know what I mean? Like, how do you, how do you kind of decide what, what level to go to? I think really serious people and big projects, they work, they state the budgets upfront. It's just part of it.

18:15 And then you need to be fully aware of what you've got to work with because people in those situations with that scale of projects, they've been around the houses, they know the process, they know there's no point in hiding the budget. They know what they've got to work with, even if it's an unrealistic one, you would, you would tell them that and just go in with much more, which is what we did this week. It's nice that even if you don't, I don't know, sometimes it's really hard to tell, isn't it? So it could go down like a lead balloon. It could completely blow people's minds how much you, you might suggest you need to get the job done properly. But I think that comes down to experience on their end really, and what they've been exposed to, what they're used to paying, and what idea they have about what they can get for their money. And on occasion, we have put a lot of work into a proposal and like done a pretty comprehensive document because we thought this is going to be a big project. If we're going to take this on, this is going to be like, you know, hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of work. This is really worth doing a pretty comprehensive document for. I would spend like at least an entire week putting something together and crafting it and doing many, many revisions to get it just so. Send it off, don't hear anything. Yeah. Absolutely nothing. Silence on the other end. And it's in those situations where you've got to try and avoid the higher the input, the higher the risk, and the more you've got to try and understand about it from the outset in order to be able to decide whether it's worth putting in an effort because a week's worth of work is a large chunk of resource for a small company. Absolutely. No, I think the thing I've come to do is I sort of use these things now a bit like trading cards in a way. So it's like the, you know, if you if the person wants to have a meeting, I need to know X, Y, and Z, you know, and so you're like giving and receiving. So if they so when it comes to the proposal, I'm like, if I'm trading a writing proposal, then they've got to tell me their budget.

20:40 You know, I mean, they've got to they've got to at least give me an indication of where they're at with that. Yeah, you know, and sort of the same with the workshop as well. If someone says, you know, if the end of that first meeting, I'm kind of like, how much, you know, what budget have you got? And they say, Oh, you know, not telling me kind of thing. In that case, I'll be like, okay, well, here's an average project price or a minimum project price. And if that and if that's okay, come come for the meeting. You know, you do get people going, I haven't got that can have the meeting anyway. But you know, I mean, you just got to be polite to them. But yeah, no, it's, it's, it's, it's quite difficult. And I think it's the sinking of time into especially the thing I have trouble with or had trouble with. I mean, now I'm more full time, like, managing rather than trying to develop at the same time when I was developing at the same time, my problem was the time sink of this stuff. And so, you know, I think I just said in my head, none of it's worth it, you know, pictures and proposals, people don't want to work for us then with us rather than, well, that's that.

21:54 But I think I was just kind of basically trying to make an excuse and fact that we just didn't have the time to do that stuff properly. I still don't think we do. I mean, I would absolutely I mean, how much your your actual proposal document, is it different every time we've you got a set we have like a default template, but it's constantly evolving, because we always think, you know, it's hard, it's hard to just let it let it be and think, oh, we could make this better.

22:23 Every time you come back to it with fresh eyes, like a couple of weeks later, when it's time to do something else, and you look at it again, and you just see room for improvement. And especially right now, we're in like a phase where we're thinking a lot about how we talk about ourselves, because we're trying to redo our website. And when you go through that process, it really makes you question how you how you talk about yourselves as a business and the way you present yourselves. And so that that doesn't help right now, that we've been through this big retrospective period.

22:56 Perfectionism. That's the problem. That's the problem I have. We're getting better at it. And the more we do, the better we get and the more structure these things take on. But it's usually a case of opening the last one you did and using that as a template and changing everything that needs to be changed. They follow a formula. One thing we've started doing recently, because if it's been circulated to quite a few people and you're not sure how many it's going to be and you haven't met everybody who's going to be in that decision making process, then definitely good to do things like an executive summary in the document right in the front.

23:37 Try and get it on one single page, summarize everything that's in it, including the prices, put them all there, bang on the front page. So anyone who's too busy doesn't get this really long, boring document that they don't want to read and have to hunt for the things that are going to help make their mind up. That's good. If it's way out of reach, they'll just put it down immediately and move on. Yep. That's almost a good piece of user experience design.

24:03 Exactly. User experience design in PDF form. Oh, so PDF, I was about to say, break it down. Like, what do you actually create this thing in? Oh, you write it in, being designers, we make it in InDesign. Yeah. Tom's got me using InDesign. It's great for doing documents and having a style to them because they all look branded and we've got our style of documents, which we're quite fond of.

24:33 It gives you a type of graphic controls to do nice layout and everything and easily export to PDF and stick a load of images and text together. It's the best thing, but I always write it in a word processor. Yes. It used to be words. Now, then Google Docs, we use a lot more and started using Dropbox paper quite a bit recently, just to get this stuff down in a form where everyone who can contribute to it can see it easily. Yeah. It just makes it easier to edit and I can do that wherever I am on any device. That makes it quite easy. Yeah. Get the words right and then get it all into a nice structured format. And these documents, the main part changes every time.

25:18 There's a similar structure that we would usually abide by depending on the project. And then everything else just goes in the appendix, including like process stuff, a little bit about us, some case studies, full terms and conditions, that sort of stuff. Bang it all in the appendix, write the back and they only have to go through that if they have to. But the meat of it is in the initial couple of pages. So we've the one, yeah, I mean, I'm rewriting us all the time and I've started, which I'm quite enjoying, is pulling like almost doing pull quotes out of those case studies and having us, you know how we are on our website with our little faces and we're saying stuff sometimes. Yes. So we actually like will stick that into the front bit. Nice. It's quite editorial approach. It's like a pullout in a magazine. Yes, completely. So you have like an outcome, like more leads will be generated by this amazing new website. And then maybe you'll have a pull quote, you have one of us with a pull quote saying what's really important is tracking those and having some good metrics, you know, and it'll be like almost one of us just chipping in. And then maybe a pull out of a case study just giving a top line, you know, we achieve this for this client. And that's when I'm kind of like, I'd love them to be I know you can link around in PDFs, but I've got a dream of like an online proposal. And I've had it for so long, but I'm just like, you know, I mean, I'm like, we're a web, we're a web company. Why are we, you know, you know, they just want to print it out, then. That's all they want to do is print it out 30 times and circulate it around the office. That's true. And the thing that's probably again, another good user experience point, knowing how people want to consume this stuff. But yeah, we did try like one of the there's like a few tools now, like a few SaaS tools like there's one called poseify. Yeah, I've seen these.

27:51 It's a bit painful, to be honest. I mean, I got the point. I got the point of it. Yeah, I dabbled. But it is. Yeah. And unless it doesn't fit your company, your process and your character. Yes, I think it would be brilliant if you were generating a couple of proposals every day for something like, you know, you were a painter, a decorator or, or, or some, you know, something where you're just like quite high volume on proposals and lots of fixed prices for things.

28:22 And you just like because it has stuff like you could choose which bits, you know, the person can actually tick what they wanted on the proposal, right, and then say, and then say, accept. And it's just that worse. That's not going to work, is it? I won't have the project management. I will have the design. I bet there's still a print button though. Yeah, of course.

28:45 Yeah, we're not paper people. We, with the proposal we did the other day, that was, it was like 36 pages long, including the appendix, which was most of it, to be fair.

29:00 Like, our stapler couldn't even staple it. With that, that I'm used to having that much paper around, I had to split it up into thirds and staple this thing three times. That's, that's serious. That's serious. So I thought, I better go and miss some paper copies just in case, because a little leave behind. Yeah, that didn't quite work out as I'd planned. Are you, is it, is it portrait or landscape?

29:33 It's portrait A4. Yep. Make it easy to print. Yeah. Standard document stuff. Okay. Is yours landscape? No, but I have seen some landscape ones.

29:45 Interesting. Yes. That's very, very unusual. Okay. Well, yeah. But I'm glad to know that the, even the more forward thinking of us are still PDFing those proposals up. That's good.

30:00 Yeah, I think it's still the easiest way. It's what they want. Yeah, it's what they want, which is more important. And it's just easy for them, easy to circulate. It's a form that people are used to. Things like your terms and conditions are all in that format. And it just makes a lot of sense. The key is just not to waffle, get it concise, make sure there's a executive summary on the cover page so people can get a glance of what's going on. Yeah. Make sure you meet with them. That's the important thing. That's a lesson we've learned this year in particular. We did a big proposal that we spoke to these people on the phone. We had a big long conversation about the brief, about the projects. It seemed like an enormous piece of work we put together. Our proposal, I spent nearly a week doing it. It was huge. It was a massive piece of work.

30:52 At least we thought it should have been. And sent the proposals off. Didn't hear anything. Checked in with them, tried to check in. Didn't hear anything. After the deadline, nothing. And checked in like five times and didn't hear anything back whatsoever. And I think it was one of the scenarios. Well, yeah, I thought it was a little bit, a little bit rude, I guess. If someone's gone to that extent and done all that work for you, even if we completely blew their budgets, which they wouldn't give us up from, just to let us know that and to give us some, we were asking for some feedback or, you know, a couple of weeks go by, you think, oh, okay, I assume, I hope you managed to find someone for the project. Assuming that they probably found someone by now. It would be possible just to get a bit of feedback, just to understand why we didn't win or what we, what maybe we could have done differently so we can learn from it. Nothing. So after that case in particular, it happened previously a lot with a smaller scale, but after that made the decision, never going to actually go to the hassle of creating a proposal if we haven't had that workshop meeting. Yeah. Must meet them, must talk to them, must make an impression, must show, demonstrate some value and a little bit of a glimpse to the process that we might go through in that workshop in that meeting. And from it at the same time, we get what we need to put the proposal together.

32:20 Yeah, I agree. I think we're going, we're going through quite an interesting one at the moment, which I think I might use this or maybe change how or change how we do this stuff a little bit, which is the guy's got a, just a Google spreadsheet of the features he wants. And so before we're doing a proposal, so we met a couple of times and, you know, I think it's, it's, it looks good.

32:46 And now actually, I'm just going to get shared his Google spreadsheet and go in and stick some costs next to each feature, then then get him on the phone and go through them. And that spreadsheet thing just at the end is going to be put into the, into the PDF obviously, because without that it's not, it's not proper. But, but, you know, like, I think there's lots, I think the ways of getting to that proposal are like that's, if the proposal is a bit stale and boring and PDF, the ways of getting there can be where you get creative, you know, and I think that's, that's the bit, that's the bit should be challenging, not, not potentially me trying to do web proposals or anything like that. But actually, it's kind of like, how creative can I be from getting from first contact through to proposal? Yeah, you know, what, what sort of things, what can I challenge about the status quo? Yeah, I agree. Because if you do it differently, like, the way I'm doing it now, I'm guaranteed to like be face to face twice. That's potentially, you know, 100%, 100% more than the people we're up against. And there's no, you know, and the other thing about, the other thing about having that second contact is they'll speak to you, they'll speak to a load of other people, someone else might start talking about a different approach. You speak to them again, and you learn that different approach. And you and you can either counter it or say, okay, yeah, we can do that. If you propose on what you knew a week ago, that can be a long time, you know, that can things can have really changed in their mind. And then your proposal is stuck on how they were thinking when they first met you, like you really want the proposal to be exactly what the thinking of the exact time they make the decision. And even a few days away, if they're speaking to other people, their idea of what can be achieved and what the requirements are can can change. Yeah, yeah, I agree. The more information you can be armed with the beginning, the better, more of a relationship you can build with that potential new client, the better. So yeah, the more times you can arrange to see them, I think you're going to be in a better position because you started building that relationship, that trust and hopefully demonstrate during those periods that you know what you're talking about and are going to be a good partner for helping them out. Completely. I've started listening to a podcast by an American guy called The Brutal Truth of Selling. Wow. I imagine a lot of people would listen to it and go, this is appalling.

35:31 But it is direct. It's like really for like salesmen, you know, I mean, like people that just generally sell, they're not got an actual speciality. They're just they're just there to sell. Yeah. But I find him really interesting. What he talks about is having like a momentum with these things. So having always having the next meeting in the in the diary. Yeah, just always keeping a momentum up on on these things. Like his thing was that card trading thing, you know, you if you're going to give him something, get something back. Yeah. What was his other thing? Oh, yeah. Never never just follow up. That was his other thing, which I think is quite valuable. It's like if, you know, if you're emailing and there's literally no value in that email, like to them, then that email is probably not going to get answered. That's when you that's what that's why people go quiet because you're just not providing them any value anymore. And although I like to think people are polite, they're not, you know, I mean, like they they they they put the potentially embarrassed, you know. So so his thing is to basically try to never get yourself into a position where you've got nothing to give. And after the and after the proposal, you pretty much have nothing to give. So you've really like, you've really got to hold off on the proposal until the absolute last minute where you think I'm sure this is going to get me the work. And even then you can put the proposal in and go through it with them. You know, you can you can do that in person on a call or, you know, we did that recently. And it's, you know, it's great, like any concerns, you just see it straight away and say, well, this is this is oh, yeah, his other thing. This is a draft proposal. I have everything as draft. So never, you know, always be like, we need to discuss this because this is draft. Oh, OK, that's a good idea. It's just how many ways can you get to like speech them again, still have something to give them? Yeah. Those there's a few things there is kind of like, I just had never thought of doing them. And it's not like breaking my like ethics, you know, how I want to work. It's just actually selling yourself a bit better. Yeah. And we would never put in a proposal that we don't actually talk through with them either. Unless in the previous workshop, you've covered up all of that stuff already. And it's really just a reiteration of the things you said there put on paper in a more official form that needs to get signed off. Yeah.

38:00 If it's not that if it's stuff they haven't seen, this can't be the only way they see it. You know, you need to be there to talk through it with them. Yeah. They'll have questions that need answering. And you may then update the document after that chance. Oh, just let me let me update that based on the things we just discussed. And we'll get that down because it's an important document and it forms the basis of the contract that you're going to sign and agree to. What's in that proposal is what's signed off on the contract. So it needs to be pretty accurate. Absolutely. And they need to be aware of what's in it. Yeah, completely. And I think you should be able to stick anything in it.

38:37 I think, like you said, you got that spreadsheet, whack it in there from these meetings. If you've got any sketches that you've done as part of the process to get to the point where you're at, then just stick it all in there. It's all relevant and it's all part of the things you've been discussing to get that far. That's an amazing idea. Yeah. Whack it in. Even if you're just doing a, you know, you could just do a sitemap or here's where you are now. These are the things we discussed where you should be going. This isn't necessarily the results that we're going to be basing it on, but this is a starting point. It just covers off everything that you've talked about up to that date.

39:13 Yeah. Well, now we're doing these workshops, you're right. They pretty much should go in. People should be more open. I'd love to see everyone's proposals.

39:25 We should do a swap. We can swap. That's not a hard. Maybe there's like a social network we could start where agencies just upload proposals and share them for everyone else to see. A guy I weren't with once got hold of a load of agencies with a fake project. I was like, I can't believe you've done that.

39:46 It's completely unethical. I even made them do work. But he picked people that probably had the resource to do it, but he just wanted to see what people's proposals were.

39:56 Wow. Gorilla. Yes. That was quite interesting. Yeah, no, I think it's kind of a, I'd love to see how people sell themselves. Yeah, it's fascinating. When we partner up with people, because obviously we only do an experience design part and we have development partners.

40:17 Yeah. Okay. And in those scenarios, you get to see the other people's proposals and it's absolutely fascinating. People are really good at talking about themselves and the way they do work, I find it'd be interesting to get someone else's opinion on ours and get a peer's opinion on something that you've written about yourself. Because I find it's really hard to write about yourself. No, we need to sort out this proposal swap where maybe where this entire podcast can lead to, but some kind of like reality show with like agencies sort of competing against each other in the style of, you know, like MasterChef or something. It's a site mapping round. Come on down. But you know what I mean? It would be great to have people like judged in that way.

41:09 Because they do it with like game development, right? There's been like shows about people making computer games, like teams competing against each other. I'd love to see just people making a site for a school. That's some value in what you're saying, right? It's like getting a third party opinion on what you're doing. I think that's a good thing. Because we're doing this business mentor thing that I know you're doing something similar. One of the things we did with him in the last session we had was we went through our proposal structure. Like the last proposal we did, we went through it and he came up with some really, really brilliant suggestions because he's obviously come from big business background, seen a lot of them over the years. He knows what he wants to see when he looks at these types of things and had a lot of input to give. I wonder if there's like a gap in the market here for like a service where you could submit your proposal to this third party and you'd completely analyse it and tear it apart and give you loads of really good suggestions on what would be a way to improve it. There's a business model. I think low level robo-mentor is what you're talking about. I'd buy that for a dollar. Yes. Good, good reference.

42:34 I guess if there was too much outside influence like with these services or with a third party then maybe they'd all, the aggregate of proposals across the board would start to all look the same.

42:45 They would slowly just evolve into one race of proposals. Proposal singularity. Yeah, exactly. Well, maybe that's a good thing. Well, the clients are going to compare these things, right? So, they're looking at trying to compare the differences. So, I guess the more similarities in structure made it easier for me to compare them. That's a food for thought. Are we not 360 now back to like suggesting that pitching for formulaic structured pitching is the only way to decide?

43:11 I think there's value in the individuality that you can bring, but I think some standardisation in structure would certainly help everybody involved. Cool. Okay, so to wrap this up, when you're doing these proposals, how do you then, assuming everything gets the green light, do you just then turn that into a contract and just go right sign at the end? If the proposal's been solid enough, a lot of the time our proposals say, "Wait and see." Because generally, I think possibly a difference in our businesses and workflows is that, whereas you're maybe saying, "This is how much design work we think we need," we're often saying, "There are lots of ways to achieve this technically. Let's wait and see." The beginning of the project will actually be the scoping bit. Sometimes they're a bit wishy-washy in that form. We do sometimes, if they've actually spelt it out, but no, often the contracts will just say, "We're going to be able to do a website. Don't worry about it." Okay. This is really reassuring. Yeah, and then some stuff about you're going to have to pay for it. Yeah. But no, we don't generally, but I can see I want to document spec a lot better and we're getting there on that. That's part of the project. So, but what I do want is what we're starting to do is having phases where after this phase, here's the spec and let's almost put that with the contract. Although we haven't really done that, that'll be the next bit. So yes and no in terms of that. Yeah. It depends on the scenario as well. Yeah. So if it's something that is pretty defined and we can deliver a fixed price, we'll turn that directly into the contract. They sign it. Don't underestimate the deposit invoice. Sometimes if it's unclear, because the spec, there needs to be a reason why that'll work done to figure out exactly what it is you're going to do, which happens quite often. We will go in with a range and just say that this, the proposal says this is the range. It can be anywhere from here to here. You are agreeing to that in principle with this contract and we will work out between us, you know, what that final figure is once we've done a bit more work, when we're a bit further down the road. But you are agreeing in principle to pay somewhere between this range and we will agree the price a bit later on. Absolutely. And you know it's serious because it's PDF'd. Exactly. It's real, man. And I've printed it. Yeah. And any other scenarios, obviously, if we're just doing things agile and we just say that it's this much time you're buying and then obviously, you know, the time value is fixed and then either the scope or some other variable needs to be flexible in order to hit the time deadlines unless they want to extend that with another contract. Right. Got you. Good stuff. Well, I hope that's been of use to some people. Absolutely. I gave away all my secrets. That's the whole idea, Dan. Yeah. Yeah, we should definitely do that proposal swap. We could both learn a lot from each other. So maybe that's an episode in itself. We can analyse each other's teardown. Yeah, proposal smackdown. Deproposal. No, cool. Brilliant. Good stuff. Well, thanks for listening, everybody. And you can find us online at perspective.fm. We are on iTunes now. Thanks to everybody who's already rated us there. That's great. Anyone who hasn't, please head on over to iTunes. Give us a rating. That really helped us out a lot. We are underscore perspective FM on the Twitters. I've been John Dark. I am from Every Interaction. That's everyinteraction.com at everyinteract on Twitter. And Dan, where can people find you? I'm at wearelighthouse.com and @wearelighthouse on the Twitter. Fantastic. If anyone has any comments or feedback, please do that on our website. And we shall see you all next time. Thanks very much. Cheers, Dan. Cheers, John.