Six proposals with the same excuse

A few years back, I saw someone post on LinkedIn about leadership training. It was a relatively new hospitality experience brand, with strong backing. They were opening sites, and it was the sort of business that looks like it’s going somewhere. Given my background, I thought I could help.

We got on the phone, and the call went well. He talked, I asked questions, we laughed in the right places. I came off it thinking I understood the brief and thinking he’d liked me, which felt like most of the job done.

So, I wrote the proposal, sent it over, and heard nothing.

I chased once, maybe twice, and still nothing. And after a couple of weeks, I did what I imagine most people reading this have done. I came up with an explanation and stopped thinking about it.

It was probably price.

Two words, and the opportunity was closed. It was a new-ish business, and I’d quoted what the work was worth, and they’d presumably found somebody cheaper or decided to leave it. Nothing to learn there beyond the obvious. I put it down to experience and moved on to the next one.

Here’s what I found out months later, and I found it out by accident rather than by looking. The person I’d spoken to had left the business. And the brand had stopped expanding, so whatever they’d been planning had come off the table.

The key point was that neither of those things had anything to do with my pricing.

But the part that should have bothered me more, and took longer to admit, is that he was never the person who’d have signed it off. That decision sat with someone I’d never spoken to, whose name I hadn’t asked for, in a business I hadn’t researched beyond reading the LinkedIn post that started it.

All of that was findable before the call. I had no reason to look, because I already had an explanation for what happened, and it was comfortable.

That’s the bit I want to spend some time on, because it’s the mechanism rather than the anecdote.

When a piece of work goes wrong, it rarely arrives as a mystery. It arrives with a cause helpfully attached. The client didn’t have budget. The timing was off. They went with somebody they already knew. Procurement got involved. Each of those is entirely plausible, which is exactly what makes it dangerous, because a plausible cause feels like an answer and it stops the investigation before it starts.

If the explanation were daft, you’d look into it. Nobody accepts “we lost it because Mercury was in retrograde” and moves on. You accept the sensible one, and accepting it feels like you’ve processed the loss, when all you’ve done is categorise it.

Mine was price. It’s the most popular one in my industry, and I suspect yours has a favourite too, some ready-made reason that comes out whenever a deal goes quiet.

That explanation cost me another half-dozen proposals.

Not immediately, and not in a way that was obvious at the time. They came in over about twelve months, spread out enough that each one looked like its own separate bad luck. Good conversation, decent brief, proposal out, silence. Filed under the same two words each time.

I was getting quite efficient at losing work, and I had a tidy explanation that kept the whole pattern invisible.

What eventually broke it was going back through every proposal I’d sent, the ones that landed as well as the ones that didn’t.

I’d never done that before. I’d looked at losses on their own, in the way you do when you’re feeling sorry for yourself on a Friday afternoon, and looking at losses on their own gets you a list of excuses. Reading them next to the winners is a completely different exercise, because the comparison does the work for you.

And there was a pattern sitting in there that I’d had no idea about.

In every proposal that won, I’d answered a set of questions on the page without ever consciously deciding to. What stage the business was actually at, and what was under pressure right now. What the client said the problem was, alongside what I thought the real problem was. What outcome they were genuinely chasing, whether that was an exit, time back, or just feeling less worried on a Sunday night. Why this scope rather than something bigger or smaller.

In the unsuccessful ones, some of those were missing. Usually the honest bit, where I say what I think is really going on. That’s the section that takes nerve to write, and it’s the section that gets cut when you’re not quite sure enough of your ground to risk it.

So, I turned it into a list, and I now work through it before I draft anything. It’s made a measurable difference in what converts.

Which brings me to the uncomfortable part, and the reason I’m writing this rather than presenting it as a neat fix.

My list doesn’t ask who makes the decision.

I built it from proposals that won. Every question on it came from a conversation that had already gone right, and in a conversation that goes right, you’re usually talking to the person who can say yes. So, the question never had to be asked, and it never showed up in the pattern.

The hospitality brand died because I was talking to the wrong person. And the method I built to stop that from happening wouldn’t have caught it, because I assembled it entirely from the times I got lucky.

I fixed the sample, found something real, and still ended up with a blind spot shaped exactly like the failure that prompted the exercise.

I’ve added the question since. What I haven’t done is convinced myself there aren’t others like it, and I think that’s the right place to land.

So, here’s what I’d do with this if I were you.

Take the last five things your business lost. Customers, pitches, tenders, applications, whatever losing looks like where you are.

Write down the reason you gave at the time. One line each.

Then go through them and mark which of those reasons you checked, as opposed to arrived at and accepted.

My guess is it’ll be one out of five, and I’d bet the same explanation appears more than once.

What are you currently telling yourself about the last piece of work you lost?

And how would you know if you were wrong?

Have a brilliant week!

Dave Rogers, The Business Explorer

If this struck a chord, my Substack goes further on the same questions. Want help applying any of it to your business? Book a call.

Need a speaker who’ll bring a fresh perspective? Reach me at info@fuelledfitandfiredup.com.

For 30 years, I’ve worked with business owners and leaders who are stuck on the wrong question. My job is to find the right one.

That usually means sitting with the messy “what if” long enough to turn it into clearer thinking and harder questions.