In his groundbreaking business book, the E-Myth Revisited, Michael Gerber offers a compelling explanation about why most small businesses fail. It is a myth that “entrepreneurs” tend to start new businesses, he writes. We all have this image of an entrepreneur as the person who drives a brilliant new concept or business innovation to capture market share. Instead, Gerber argues that most new businesses are started by people who have a particular technical skill set (“technicians”) but become frustrated in working for others and believe their technical know-how is enough to produce and sell the best products and services in the marketplace. The problem, according to Gerber, is that technical skills are not sufficient to succeed in business. New business owners need to have a clear vision about what they want their ideal businesses to be, lay out the specific path and systems to get there, and guide the technical expertise to implement the plan. Unfortunately, most new business owners do not have the diverse skills to achieve these goals or take the time to plan for success, so their businesses inevitably fail. The rest of the E-Myth Revisited is then a guide to help new business owners avoid that catastrophe.
I read the E-Myth Revisited before opening my restaurants some years ago and remember thinking it was so insightful that I picked it up again a few weeks ago. I now appreciate that I could have done a better job with my previous business if I followed Gerber’s guidance more carefully. This guidance is equally important for many other types of business activities, including the development of proposals for large-scale social impact. In the same way that Gerber argues burgeoning small businesses need a balance of technical, managerial, and entrepreneurial expertise, so too do our proposals for large-scale social good.
As I wrote in last week’s article, “Prioritizing operations in proposals,” I have written and read scores of proposals in my career. Almost without exception, first drafts of proposals emphasize sets of activities that could be implemented to achieve project goals. I explained this outcome as the proposal writer’s desire to “cover” the client’s expectations in the solicitation. But there is another reason, too, which is that most proposal writers are technicians at heart. They are people who have technical skills who have implemented project activities previously. Their minds automatically go to the question of “What is the client asking us to do?”
This approach may be even more pronounced when the proposed project is a contract instead of a grant or cooperative agreement. While grants and cooperative agreements are about partnership in assisting the client to accomplish a particular goal, contracts are commitments to produce a specific product or service. It therefore makes sense that in responding to a request for proposals for a contract a proposal writer would focus on how best to produce the required outputs.
The problem is that enumerating sets of activities as a starting point in proposal development often makes it difficult to bring those activities together into a manageable operational whole. It makes it difficult to develop synergies, efficiencies, or account for external forces that inevitably affect project implementation. Perhaps more importantly, starting with sets of individual project activities makes it difficult to back into the logic for an overall conceptual approach. What is the overall vision for the project? How do individual project pieces come together into a greater project whole?
These questions are not meant to be theoretical or abstract. They have real implications for implementation. My favorite sociologist, Emile Durkheim, wrote more than 125 years ago about the problems of moving from basic agriculture to industrialization. In family farming, everyone who works on the farm understands how his or her labor contributes to the whole. In contrast, in factories, people only have responsibility for their individual piece of the system and start to lose sight of the larger goal. The result is isolationism, anonymity, and problems with individual pieces that can then effect the larger system. Similarly, if projects are organized around individual activities, it makes it difficult for team members, partners, and participants to be motivated by the underlying spirit of the project or know how to ensure that their work contributes to or complements the larger endeavor.
Instead of starting a proposal design with a brainstorm about individual activities, I recommend the following three sequential steps:
- Start with a visioning session. The very first activity in proposal development should be an exercise to envision what the world looks like at the end of the project period. What will have changed? Where? The purpose is not to create a utopia for how perfect things will be in three or five years. Think BIG but also be as concrete and practical as possible. This exercise flexes your entrepreneurial skills. It forces you to dig deeply about how your organization’s efforts will impact individuals, families, communities, and the larger society.
- Reverse-engineer the steps to achieve the vision. The next activity in proposal design should be a brainstorm about the broad activities and necessary steps and budget that will help achieve the future vision. All are essential to conceive together, as the activities and operational steps must be in sync for a project to succeed. These are the managerial and technical skills that Gerber discusses respectively as the other two legs of the implementation triad.
- Fill in the gaps. This last step includes all the details that make the skeleton efforts in steps 1 and 2 a reality. The entrepreneur, manager, and technician—whether a single person with multiple skills or multiple people—come together to make sure the conceptual framework, activities, and operational steps are cohesive in a way that the proposal, if successful, can be implemented smoothly and with the expected impact.
Obviously, this is an overly simplistic view of the proposal process. There are many more steps and details that a proposal team must consider. However, reorganizing the proposal steps and honoring the appropriate roles of entrepreneurial, managerial, and technical thinking will go a long way in developing better conceived proposals and, with good fortune, stronger starts to project implementation.
