Leave them better than you found them.

A friend of mine, who owns a small graphic design and web development company, called me a while back and asked if I could help him put together a new professional proposal for a customer who wanted a decent size project done.  Being the good friend that I am (and the fact he lives at the beach) I loaded my daughter in the car for a Sunday afternoon of sun, sand and proposal writing.

I figured we would be better off if we could create some boiler-plate that helped him to create professional proposals quicker in the future.  We spent most of the day working on the skeleton for his template.  As most small/medium business owners do, he jumped right to the what he is quoting part and started working...  Cool your jets turbo, we need to back up a few spaces...



The first thing I lead him through was to document the key differentiators of his company compared to his competition.  The second thing was to have him articulate what value these key differentiators bring to his customers.  Finally, the last thing was to put the sections in for the what he will be doing for his customer.

As a graphic design company he is all about helping people move their brand into print and web.  We all know these are valuable things that all companies can benefit from.  But he was going to market by saying he could do a job for less money than his competition.  The reason he could do a job for less is because of his investment in making reusable technology work for him.  That however was not what came across in his proposals.

The thing people saw was some amount of work that needed to be done and a price.  The sales process involved him explaining why he was less money, but his proposals did not tell the right story.  When you are in the market to buy something as valuable as your brand or persona, you want to get it right.  My friend gets it right, and the graphics and web sites his company puts out are second to none.  But if everyone is 25% higher priced than you are, people start to ask questions.  The problem is not the questions, it's when they don't ask them of you.  I am sure he has had some people go elsewhere because  his price was too low.

The easy solution to this problem of course is just to raise his prices.  His work certainly justifies a price increase.  The problem is, being the down to earth and morally stable guy he is, he doesn't feel good about charging someone more than what it takes him to provide his product.  I can respect that... So his proposals had to communicate what his customers get, why it is so good and why he can offer it for the low prices he does.

The end result was a template that was 6 pages long.  Mostly boiler plate about the things that he understands are important to his customer and what they need to know to make their experience with him or his competitor as productive as possible.  His proposal gives them an education about their branding, their image and how important it is to make their customers feel good about them.  These proposals convey all these same things for my friends company to his clients.  After all, the things that his company does that are valuable to customers doesn't change because of the specifics of the job.  Those specifics are the details that should be tweaked for each client, but his company mission stays the same.

The goal, as it should be for all businesses, is to leave his customers better off than he found them, whether they buy from him or not.