In the last three weeks, I’ve written three proposals. It’s been tough for me. This is not something that comes naturally. I can see that they’re getting better, and they’re easier to write, yet I still see it as a strange and a mysterious territory, one that I’m just learning to walk through with confidence.
It’s not a lack of confidence about my own abilities. If I didn’t have that, I’d be a fool to be starting my own thing like this. If I had to hire a web developer, there’s no question who I’d hire. I’ve seen my own work, and for my money, there’s no one I’d rather have on my side but myself. The hard part is translating that confidence to the page. Or more precisely, translating it to the page in a way that’s relevant to the client.
So much of the value of the work I do is hard to quantify. How do I put a number on the extra care I take with my eye to the screen making sure no pixels are out of line? Or the drafts of unpresentable design comps that come before the one that finally hits and ends up in the client’s hands? Or the way I accommodate client’s requests for changes well past the sensible break-off point, because I’d rather have a happy client than a few more hours to kill?
I can’t, so instead I turn to the tropes of our business—of being able to increasing the the value of their brand, of being able to optimize their search rankings, of a standards-based codebase. None of which is untrue or misleading. Those are important things; everyone says it. But that’s just it: everyone says it.
I’m learning—as we’re all destined to someday—that it’s all about the details. The qualitative, rather than the quantitative. This is why I prefer to meet a potential client in person before even submitting a proposal, and why I address them directly in the proposal, instead of as a headless entity. These touches, which I’ll admit I’m still no expert at, go a long way toward making a personal connection. My hope is that the person on the other end of the proposal will recognize that—and more importantly, value it, to the tune of a signature on the bottom line.
None of this is revolutionary. Yet it’s new to me. I guess that’s because I prefer to see things—everything—as a problem of analytics. Everything should be solvable by a process. It’s disconcerting to me when there is no definite, for sure, 100% way to say that what I’m doing is going to garner the result I desire. Yet, such is the job at hand. Funny place for a CS boy to find himself.