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The 20-Year Small Business Trap
I recently reviewed a proposal which contained the following corporate introduction that started on the first page of the Executive Summary:
[Company Name] is a wholly owned subsidiary of [Parent Company Name]. Founded in [Year], [Company Name] is now ranked as one of the top 10 Federal Contractors, with annual revenues of over [$Billion] and more than [Number] employees. [Company Name] is the leading provider of [list of services]. [Company Name] is over [Years] of sustained growth in [service list].Clearly, the company is impressed with itself, however, none of these statements show any benefit to the customer or reason why the customer should care.
When I first read it, I was thinking "blah, blah, blah…" because it is a typical paragraph. Most proposals have similar statements in them.
It was only when I started parsing it sentence by sentence that I realized how totally devoid of meaning the entire paragraph is, and how offensive it must be to the customer to be required to read all that meaningless text.
Sentence by Sentence Analysis
| Sample Sentence | Analysis |
| [Company Name] is a wholly owned subsidiary of [Parent Company Name]. | This is a simple fact. If being part of the parent company is a good thing (for example, it might provide access to additional resources), then you need to say it. Sometimes you must disclose simple facts like this. If so, do it in the pricing/contracts section or in a text box separate from the narrative text. |
| Founded in [Year], [Company Name] is now ranked as one of the top 10 Federal Contractors, with annual revenues of over [$Billion] and more than [Number] employees. | If you are a large company, does it really matter whether you were founded 10, 15, or 50 years ago? If so, say why it matters. Similarly, how does being one of the top contractors or the number of employees matter to this customer? As for the revenue number, do you really want a salesperson to introduce his or her self by citing the annual revenue of their company? |
| [Company Name] is over [Years] of sustained growth in [service list]. | Citing your growth or success does not tell the customer anything. It could just as easily indicate you are over-extended as it could mean something beneficial. If it matters, you need to say why. |
How it came to be...
It was at this point in my review when I realized why this paragraph was in the proposal. It was because this part of the billion dollar company with tens of thousands of employees was created through the acquisition of several small businesses. The group doing the proposal was part of an organization that used to be a small business.
Small businesses are often hungry to tell you several things:
- We've been in business for enough years that you don't have to worry about us going out of business tomorrow
- We have enough employees to be able to staff the project
- We have enough revenue to fund the project
- We're growing, so if you think we're acceptable today, just wait --- by the end of the project we could be really exceptional
This paragraph was in the proposal because they used to be a small business. Each time someone needed to write a proposal, they would go look for a proposal they had previously written. And if the proposal had won, it must therefore be a good proposal. Over time, they carried this paragraph forward as an example of what a proposal should look like.
Now for the part of the story that I think is amazing. When do you think this paragraph was originally written into their proposals? This organization was a small business 20 years ago! Then it was a mid-sized company and then it was acquired by a large company. And here it is, 20 years later, a billion dollar company with tens of thousands of employees eager to show what a successful small business it is!
This is the small business trap. Instead of learning to write each proposal according to the customer being pursued, they wrote their proposals according to what was traditionally acceptable. While the organization had changed long ago, their notion of what is traditionally acceptable did not change. Small businesses, tend to be over eager for acceptance. Large businesses tend to over-value being traditional. With so many employees, such a large organization, and so many examples that contain it, they will find this habit hard to break.
If you are a small business, don't fall into the same trap. Make your proposals about your customers, and not about yourself.
If you are a large business, better go check your templates. How many 20 year mistakes do you think you will find?
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