I Have a Proposal for You...

 When Jimmy's boos, John, went to France for 10 or so days, I was asked to help Jimmy hold down the fort at the shop.  I agreed, thinking that it would be a simple task of helping deliver orders and maybe write an e-mail or two.  I mean, why not?  I used to do this all the time.  It's old hat to just take it up again for a few days, right?

I even went so far as to celebrate my ignorance by slipping into a little bakery in town and getting a little taste of France for the family.

But then, I saw the huge stack of papers...34 to be exact...that were stacked on the desk awaiting my attention.

It was a solicitation that we needed to write a proposal for.  It was for a company that we have been doing business for over the last 7 years or so, so John and I both thought that it would be no problem to just put in the basic info and send it off just to keep our company in the door.

But that was not so!  We needed to write a full proposal for a job that we were already doing...and it was due the week after John got back!

Well, neither John nor I have ever written a proposal like this, and the cost of getting one done professionally was was out of our price range, so, with John half a world away, it was up to me to write this proposal!

Of course, the first thing you have to do to be able to respond to a document is to understand what exactly it is that the document is asking for in the first place.  It took me the first 3 days just to read through the thing and cross out what didn't apply to us, mark what did, and highlight what I didn't understand.  Let's just say that there was so much yellow on those pages they probably would have glowed in the dark.

Then, I made a list of my questions and sent to off to the person who posted the solicitation in the first place, and his answer was that basically, we didn't need to do anything with the first 32 pages, but all we needed to do was listed on the last 4 pages, one of which was mostly blank.

With that news, I redid my markings and got on with it.  John was back by now, but since I had already started the whole thing, it was much 'easier' for me to just finish it and let him do the marketing stuff that he needed to be doing.

Anyway, I did the best that I could and turned that bad boy in on time on Friday morning.

Oh, and can I just throw out there that in the middle of this whole thing, we also went through a name change for the company, so all of our numbers, DUNS and CAGE and registrations, had to be switched to reflect our new name.

Anyway, come Monday morning, we got the notice that the solicitation was cancelled and we could resubmit in a few days after they post it again.

What?  Really?  All that just to have the whole thing cancelled?  Can they even DO that?

Well, I guess so.  But at least it's done for when they decide to open it back up!

C'est la vie!