I'm a type A, control freak with a desire for perfection. If I can't do it right, I'd rather not do it at all. And I'd rather have control over my own destiny than leave it to others. I'm also a planner and very detail-oriented. All of which makes my job both rewarding and challenging.
Rewarding because if there's ever a process that needs a planner and someone to look after all the details, it's proposal management. The entire process is controlled chaos. Bringing together writing from a bunch of different people and trying to make it into a cohesive whole. Managing a schedule that is almost always ridiculously tight. Organizing a team of people, none of whom (or very few of whom) actually report to you. To produce something that has the potential to bring the company millions of dollars if done well and create a great deal of scrutiny on the proposal team if not done well.
Then of course, there's the explicit reward of winning the work. Which may or may not bring a financial bonus as well. But always gives you an implicit sense of accomplishment that sometimes means even more than the explicit award itself. Even a losing proposal has an inherent reward, just for getting it done.
Part of the challenge is the need to be flexible, however. You develop a schedule. You plan for how the process is supposed to come together. And then you have to recognize that it's just never going to happen that way. No proposal has ever followed the schedule. Deadlines almost always have to slip. Sometimes you get good writing. More often than not, it's okay but needs to be tweaked substantially. And I don't care how long you have to work on a proposal, that last few days is always crazy as you try to corral the chaos into a final, compliant, and well-written document - or three.
Another challenge comes from my perfectionist side. No proposal is ever perfect. As many times as I read the pages, there's almost always something that slips through - a typo or the wrong word choice. There comes a point where you just have to let it go. To recognize that it's as good as it's going to get in the time allotted and the chaos that has ensued. My perfectionist self doesn't always like that, but it's a fact of the job.
The biggest challenge comes from the lack of control over my work life and the fact that all the planning in the world can't account for every crisis that may hit. My schedule is in constant flux. That makes it very hard to commit to anything outside of work. I have a friend who joined a local choir, and I thought that would be something I'd enjoy. But they have practice every Tuesday night, and I just can't promise that I'll be available every Tuesday. At some point in most proposals, working late into the evening just is required. On some proposals, it becomes more the rule than the exception. The same is true for doing volunteer work on the weekends. Some weekends, I can be reasonably certain that I won't have to work. And then a RFP will come out when it wasn't expected. Or the schedule for one I'm working will slip and the time will have to be made up using the weekends. Or in some cases, the proposal team just expects the weekends to be worked, though I try not to let that happen too often. So I can sign up for volunteer work, but I can't always make it in the end. And I can't commit to a certain number of hours a month. Because I never know how much time I'm really going to have.
The final challenge - and the one that's been keeping me up this week - is that proposals are always in the middle of a financial tug-of-war. Senior management and stockholders expect the business to grow at a certain rate every year. That growth cannot be composed of just growing existing work. It has to include new work, because inevitably some old programs are going to shrink or go away altogether. So we constantly need to respond to RFPs for new work. But there's a cost to responding, and that cost has to be covered by our profits. Because those of us who work exclusively on proposals don't bring in any money from working on programs. And it's the programs that generate income - direct income. Proposals are indirect work - work that may generate income, but may not. There's risk in that, and it's a balance that has to be managed carefully. You can't spend more money going after new work than is generated by the work you have. And yet, you are required to bring in new work all the time. So we have to try to squeeze in as much proposal work as we can for as little money as possible, and we need to limit the number of proposals we work that we don't win - because that's essentially wasted money spent. Realistically, companies know they can't win everything. But there's a percentage of winning that's expected, again to generate new work for the company and to cover the expense of getting the work in the first place.
Some days, I think I'm in the perfect job for me. And some days, I'm not so sure. But then again, that's true of most of life, isn't it?
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