An Easier Way to Win Awesomer Jobs

For the first six months of my consulting career, I was what you would call “the easygoing freelancer.”

Seriously — they exist. I was one of them. I know I am lucky. Through awesome friends and professional contacts, I scored a fair amount of work. Not just any kind of work, but interesting, challenging work with clients doing cool things. It all just kind of fell in my lap. Except for a few nail-biting moments in the Fall where I was juggling an outsized group of projects, I had enough quality time to maintain my mayorship of Prospect Park. Life was good.

This Spring, as the tax man approacheth, I have faced a bit of a reckoning. It’s nice to be lucky, and beyond amazing to have great clients and awesome friends, but where am I going with all of this? What’s the bottom line? Looking at all those little stubs and receipts I felt an overwhelming desire to build a bigger picture.

I realized that I need to keep a better balance sheet, set strategic goals for myself, and doing a better job of putting my best foot forward and winning new work.

However, between my lofty goals and my present reality is a lot of legwork, right? A lot of boring stuff, like writing proposals. While I can write quickly and on deadline, I dont know, I freeze up when faced with the prospect of a blank proposal page.

In my darkest hour, I started Googling for help. And it turns out that there are actual, you know, applications, that take the pain out of writing proposals.

I just tried one, Bidsketch, and I am thrilled at how much less sucky it makes the process of proposal writing. It gives you a template, and you simply fill in the blanks with your own unique spin. Press a button and voila, you have a crisp, beautiful and extremely professional-looking proposal. I especially like the way I can customize my own boilerplate to make the process of writing the next proposal that much less annoying. Basically, this nifty little software has taken away all of my excuses to not beat the streets for more work.

While Bidsketch cannot actually write the proposal for you, it basically does the next best thing…make it dead easy, so you have no excuse but to get out there and bid on more work. Who can argue with that?

So if you are a proposal procrastinator like me, give it a try.