Scribe Consulting

Do you write business letters or other business correspondence? If so, think about how these questions apply to your situation:

1.  When is it appropriate to use first-person pronouns like I, we, me, us, my and our? 

2.  When is it appropriate to use contractions like it's, isn't,we'll and let's?

If we were e-mailing a personal note to a friend, most of us would use both first-person pronouns and contractions. If we were writing a report to be sent to a senior executive, we might use neither. So the question arises: How do we decide when to use them and when not to? First-person pronouns and contractions can affect the tone of our writing in various ways (both good and bad) as shown in the following table:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTRACTIONS                          NO CONTRACTIONS               
OR PRONOUNS                           AND PRONOUNS

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
informal                                        formal disrespectful
respectful natural sounding            stiff, wooden, pompous
inviting, warm                               distant, cold, official

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sharon McMillan is a writer and advocate for the healthy “new urbanist” lifestyle. 

If you've decided that the long commute to work is no longer for you but you're not sure how you're going to pay your bills without your job, don't despair. There's a chance you can keep your job and work from home as well.

The solution is telecommuting and it is a choice that many companies are accepting as a way to keep employees, improve business, and support "green living" by helping to cut down on the number of long distance commuters whose cars affect our air quality.

Your first and most important challenge will be to identify whether or not your job can be done from home. Thanks to technology many jobs that involve the handling of sensitive or confidential data can now be conducted safely outside company walls without concern or worry that the data will be compromised. Many firms allow data entry operators, customer service representatives, claims adjudicators and others to handle confidential information about clients from their home computers because the appropriate security measures are part of the information technology system. If you have a job that you can complete effectively outside of the physical walls of your company office, then you really can consider telecommuting.

Co-owner of the 24 Hour Company

1.  Judge a book by its cover.

Proposals have been won and lost because of covers. A well-designed cover that focuses on the potential/current costumer’s benefits or addresses key issues plays a significant role in the final decision. If you are resource starved, focus the design time on your cover and, if possible, a few key graphics that illustrate benefits and discriminators.

2.  Benefits, benefits, benefits!

Use “benefits boxes” or “takeaways” on your pages or slides to list the benefits to your potential/current customers. Do not assume they know the reasons why your new “six sigma process” will benefit them. Make it obvious. Spell it out. Prioritize the benefits. The best-case scenario is to tie the benefit to a portion of an image since words are processed by our short-term memory and images go directly into our long-term memory. Put them in order of value with #1 being the most significant. Do not list too many. The rule of thumb is to use no more than five to nine. (We can only retain about 7 bits of information—plus or minus 2. This is why we have 7-digit phone numbers.)

President of Organizational Communications, Inc.

During the past 15 years, I have assisted not only Fortune companies, but also scores of small businesses in preparing their contract proposals. This work has included both hands-on service and providing other consultants / teams to assist small and small disadvantaged businesses, mostly in the $3 - $30 million size range. Businesses served have included everything from base maintenance to very high technology IT in 11 states scattered between New York, Florida, and California.

This experience has provided insight into the situation and experience of small business. The primary problems I have seen that stand in the way of small businesses winning more contracts are these two:

(1.) Most small businesses do not adequately plan their business development operations. They do not have in place a process to identify target programs and to start tracking them 18 to 24 months prior to RFP release date. When the bid period arrives, consequently, they are not in a position to write the winning bid. Instead, some other company that has made friends with the customer, influenced the preparation of the solicitation, and made alliances with the best subcontractors long in advance walks off with the prize.

(2.) Most small businesses do not have bid and proposal budgets adequate to achieve the desired results. Many firms will actually start their proposal preparation work late on purpose in order to limit the cost of preparing the bid. Others curtail cost by getting their bids done mostly through the after-hours work of employees or by assigning unqualified personnel to the bid team just because they are between assignments.