The Shortlist Episode 84: RFP Roast

In the AEC industry, RFPs and RFQs are a fact of life—but that doesn’t mean we can’t vent about the quirks that make RFPs unnecessarily challenging. From overly detailed questions squeezed into tight page limits to unclear addenda, Monday due dates, and outdated submission requirements, Middle of Six principals Wendy Simmons and Melissa Richey swap tales of headscratchers and horror stories alongside designers Becky Ellison and Lauren Jane Peterson.

And in true roast fashion, the panelists also turn the spotlight on themselves, confessing their own “Wildcard" marketer tendencies that show up when proposal deadlines loom. The result is a candid, relatable roast for anyone who has ever opened an RFP and wondered … why?

CPSM CEU Credits: 0.5 | Domain: 4

Podcast Transcript

Welcome to The Shortlist. We're exploring all things AEC marketing to help your firm win The Shortlist.

I'm your host, Wendy Simmons, and today we're talking with Melissa Richey, Becky Ellison, and Lauren Jane Peterson to have a little bit of an RFP roast, right? Hi guys, thanks for joining us. This should be a fun one.

Roasted.

Yes, it was gonna be a good one.

Yeah, thanks for having us, so excited.

This is gonna be good.

Some of our listeners may remember season two, episode 40, where Melissa and I discussed RFP pet peeves. Very curious to see if any of those have been relieved or if we've only gotten more peeve about them since we talked about that a few years ago.

But this is a different vibe because we were bringing on a couple of our designers who get their hands into RFPs and maybe feel some of the torture of what happens at the last minute more than anyone.

So should be a really good conversation, but before we get into it, curious, what are you all working on? What's on your plate? How many RFPs are you currently responding to and have floating around in your head?

Who wants to start? Melissa, what's up with you?

I think I've got four RFPs under my purview right now. Two of them for the same client. Well, I guess three of them for the same client of ours, two of them for the same school district.

So that should be interesting trying to keep two RFPs straight, as well as a couple of websites, three website projects, four website projects. So many websites, so many proposals.

Websites can feel a little bit like a proposal. It has a lot of similar components to a proposal. It's just stretched out over a longer duration, and it is more long-lasting, but they have a lot of similarities to them.

That's a lot to keep straight, but that's how we roll over here at Middle of Six. Becky, what about you? What are you working on?

Weirdly, I am not working on any proposals right now, which is absolutely bonkers.

No one can believe it. I'm usually on several at a time, but to be fair, before anyone gets jealous, I am working on a proposal template that has encompassed quite a bit of stuff. You know, the response document itself, covers, tabs, print files.

I'm doing an A3. It's like the most comprehensive proposal suite. And I'm a complete dork, so I actually enjoy that sort of thing.

Well, we'll be curious to hear if there's anything that shows up in your templates based on the RFP roasting we're going to do.

So, cool. Okay, Lauren Jane, can you beat Melissa on the number of proposals you have your hands on?

No, not now. No. Right now, I'm really only involved in one proposal in a very minimal way.

I touched it a little bit to do a design pass, and the proposal team, which includes you, Wendy, is working on it and doing a great job.

So, if they need me, I'll come back around, but I have just one small proposal project on my plate, which is also rare. Right now, I'm really focused on some websites, and I'm a second pair of eyes for Becky on that proposal template project.

Well, it's good to have a little bit of break from the deadlines of proposals and be refreshed in other creative ways and then bring it back to the team as they need your help to jump in with whatever that ends up being. I'm doing a quick tally here.

I'm technically on five proposals, but I would say less involved than the way Melissa is involved on her proposals. Two of them are kind of running without me, and the other three are pretty straightforward.

Repeat clients, we know exactly what we're going to do, not as much to keep straight over there, but three of those and then maybe one less website or so. Who knows?

Yeah, actually, as you all talked, I was like, wait, there's three more, wasn't I? I wasn't thinking about.

I mean, you've got a whole client over there.

But same thing, like where I'm not necessarily as involved in some of them are a lot more straightforward than others.

And even though it can sound like a lot to have, you know, whatever, however many at a time, we talked to marketers who may be working on seven, eight, nine proposals at a time.

And they have ways of making it work and keeping themselves organized and hopefully getting a break so that they don't get burned out because having that much to juggle and those many that many personalities, maybe some of those personalities are

wildcard personalities and they're giving you gray hair, right? It can take a lot out of the marketing team. So today's a little bit of a therapy session. We're going to put it out there.

I'll be curious to hear any feedback from our listeners about things that they totally agree with or maybe some stuff that we missed. But this is what's going to be on the top of our mind today. So let's dig in.

Anybody want to share why we thought this would be fun for our listeners? Like, why should we just go and get, I don't know, ugly over RFPs? You know, how can that help us do our work better?

Everybody has grapes.

It's true.

We've all been in the trenches with RFPs. I think like, especially, you know, AEC marketers doing the hands on work. Like it's kind of unusual that we are so involved in the process.

And this is so important. This stuff, some of these jobs can be like, you know, 200 million dollars worth of work and like represent hundreds of people's jobs and whatever.

And then there's just this like shivering, nervous, burned out marketing coordinator reading through the RFP, every single word, like a high powered attorney, like you have to make sure that you understand every single nuance.

And then you have to put it together and like make sure it right. And then get it submitted on time and not like a second too late. Like that's so much responsibility.

And I think like when you have that much responsibility, you have to take a look at how ridiculous some of the things are that we all just sort of accept it and connect with one another.

And this is bonding and it just marketers, if you're listening, we hear you, we see you, we are you. And this is a safe space. Please, please chime in.

We want to hear your stories as well.

Yeah, walk down the street and yell out into the air, all of the things that you agree with in our lives today as you're listening to the podcast. Yeah, I agree.

When an RFP comes across your desk or into your email and you open it up, I'm curious, what are some of the, sorry, this is totally off script, but I'm thinking about it for my own, when Becky were describing this, but like what are some of the

emotions you have when you open it up? Let's say you open it up and it's a four-page RFP, or you open it up and it's a 319-page RFP.

And just kind of like your own starting off experience with looking at that document and realizing, oh, I have to know every word of this so that I can guide the team.

That's the first thing I look at as a page number. That's exactly what I do now. I flip right to that page number and if it's more than 20 or something, then I just go, oh, this is going to hurt, you know?

But sometimes it's contracts and forms and stuff, though. You never know. You got to skim it.

Take that first initial pass.

Melissa, over your years of getting into RFPs, are there any early clues or anything that you look at that makes you understand what your life is going to look like for the next three to six weeks?

Well, if I have to scroll, I don't know, a good 20 pages before I get to the submission requirements, I'm like, oh, this is going to be one where I'm going to be reading it 15 times over to make sure I caught everything.

A lawyer definitely had a big hand in preparing this RFP.

Right. Yeah, I think we've talked about this on other podcasts, and everyone maybe has their own way of going through an RFP.

But generally speaking, I hear from marketers that you go through it about three times before you are really ready to kick it off, right? That first skim that Becky was talking about, where you just get a sense of like, what are we looking at here?

What's the general vibe? And then that closer look at, okay, what are they asking for? Have I answered this before?

Does this feel like something that our team is going to be able to respond to pretty easily? And then getting into the nitty gritty of what are all those deadlines? Do we miss any deadlines?

Is there anything that needs to happen immediately? Some of those details can be just tucked in, not in the right spot.

And you wouldn't want to miss a mandatory pre-submittal meeting just because it was randomly on page 79, not clearly stated elsewhere. So that's kind of how it starts.

And after doing hundreds and hundreds of proposal responses, I think we've got some pet peeves. I'm curious, maybe we do a little roundtable. What's your number one?

I'm going to make you say number one pet peeve for RFPs.

I'll start. Conflicting instructions or directions. Yeah.

It's very difficult. I see this happen more often with those lengthy RFPs.

You can read something in the first section, and then in that later section, they ask for something different or something kind of the same bit word differently, and it leaves you feeling unsure.

And it also is a red, that's a red flag to me when I review things. I'm like, oh no, like, where was the disconnect? Or were they restating something?

But because they worded it differently, it wasn't clear. And now I'm left curious of, you know, I think I need to submit a question for this, or will somebody else submit the question for this? And seeking clarity.

It's my number one.

Well, one of mine is similar but different, but when the submittal requirements don't match the evaluation criteria, you know, you think, okay, I've got everything I know. Here's all of section one, section two. Here's where this goes.

We've got resumes in the appendix. And then usually somewhere after the submission requirements comes the evaluation criteria.

Then you start matching them up and all of a sudden you're being asked for an approach or you're going to be graded on an approach, but they didn't ask for approach. And so now it's like, okay, where do we fit that in?

Do we ask a clarifying question? Do we just create another section? Do we say, here's our response to the submission requirements, and here's our response to the evaluation criteria?

So it just creates some ambiguity, and then I think that can be interpreted differently by different firms.

So you're creating a situation for the reviewers where they're maybe not comparing apples to apples because different people interpret it differently. So that one is probably my number one.

I have a lot of peeves, but I think to be concise, they all center around this concept that I'm 100% sure that the content in these RFPs has been copied and pasted for 400 years, and they have just been saying the same thing forever.

And no one thinks about it. No one's reading all these millions of details they're asking for in this old info, just project details. What was the original budget of whatever project 100 years ago?

No one's reading this, I guarantee it. But you know that every time they put an RFP together, they're just like copy paste, old document, here we go. And no one's ever thinking like, why don't we pare this down?

No one's reading all this information. No, just copy paste and we'll all just, this could have been an email. I think every proposal probably could have been an email, but then we'd be out of a job, so maybe I should just zip it.

Yeah, zip it, Becky.

Thanks for sharing all of those. I am not exaggerating. I'm not lying at all.

On the five proposals I'm on, I have an example of each of those instances. The RFP I read this morning before we started podcasting is for a school, and everywhere in the RFP it says health care. So I'm like, I mean, I know.

I know I'm not going to be listing the relevant health care projects, but it just makes you kind of cringe and die a little inside.

You're going to try so hard to make it so dialed in, so accurate, and really reflect your team, and to be responding to an RFP that's sloppy like that. I don't know, it takes the wind out of my sails personally.

Well, it feels like a mismatch of expectations or a risk that the submitter will be judged more harshly or more carefully than the RFP was even read and reviewed, and it's like, wait, we're not aligned. Do you really want me to submit with care?

Because this was not published with care.

Yeah, exactly.

Wendy, what's yours? What's your number one?

Oh, my goodness.

I feel like when you're asked to respond, well, my worst, the thing I hate opening up the RFP, looking at the submittal requirements and the questions is when it's a massive paragraph, and there are, I don't even know, 20 items we have to respond to

in this one paragraph. And it feels like usually in those RFPs, they're asking for structure.

They want everything answered in the order that it was in the RFP, and they have this very strict on one side of things, and then these big blobs of questions. And by the way, there's like a two page limit for this section.

I'm like, I could do the full proposal on this one question. It's so much, it's just so comprehensive, and the words matter. So when they ask for every project you've ever done, I was like, I take that literally.

I'm like, how am I going to fit every project, or how are we going to summarize it? So it's just like asking for way too much in too little space, just makes me go round and around in circles on how to properly respond.

Luckily, I'm not dealing with that right at this moment, but I'm sure it's the next one that's coming down the line. So I'll just wait a second and then that'll happen. Oh, man.

Okay. Well, then sort of similar to that, I'm curious to hear from you both.

Is there anything about the RFP, you know, kind of those very annoying things that agencies and our clients, clients, the owner's side, you know, are doing that they just kind of need to stop immediately?

You know, like no more against the law, go to jail. Right? That kind of thing.

Printed copies can go back to hell.

Why are we still printing things? It is 2026. We are in the future.

Let's act like it. No one on earth. I don't, I literally don't know any person who has a printer.

I think one of our former workmates was like the only person I've ever known who has one in their home. No one's printing anything.

Clearly, as we can see in our industry as graphic designers, Lauren Jane and I know like no one's printing anything anymore. It is it is so bizarre. I can't imagine anyone wants to like sit there.

People are working from home like who's even reading these printed copies? It's it's it's wacko. You can search through a PDF.

Everyone has email. Unless you are proposing on like an Amish dairy farm, like everything should be 100 percent digital at this point. Oh, my God.

Becky, that is what I was feeling, too.

But my my thought was that it's when it's one printed copy, it drives me more crazy than six. I'm like, OK, sure, you want six. Great.

Everyone's going to have them and you all are going to have a have a nice meeting and it'll be all good together to have those printed copies.

But one, I just feel like that's just vanity. That's just spite. That's mean spirited.

You've pushed the due date basically 24, 48 hours earlier just to have that delivered on time.

So, yeah, that one, I think just just just stop along the same lines with the printed piece is the one inch margins.

Mm hmm.

And and especially if they're not requiring printed copies, like, why?

What? Like, I understand maybe a margin requirement if they're printed copies or something. I don't know.

It just feels like, what? Why are we doing this? And you lose so much piece.

And honestly, an inch is huge, like an inch on either side. That's two inches of of width lost for text to flow across. It's like, I don't even know.

I don't understand why. Why are we doing this?

Yeah. I mean, I take it from when they used to have to do record management by scanning in the proposals. Well, that's the other thing.

They ask for a printed copy, and then they ask you to email them or put a flash drive with a PDF in. So it's like, you're clearly not scanning this for record retention. Like, why are we doing this?

Yeah. I asked a clarifying question on that recently because we were on the second phase of this pursuit. In the first phase, our client had ignored that requirement.

And I was like, well, I don't feel comfortable making that risk, taking that risk, so I'm going to ask the question. And they maintained it.

So it was painful, but I didn't want to get our client rejected if someone decided to get their ruler out and they're like, oh, those weren't one inch margins.

So they were scared to take a stand.

Do you ever ask a question and get the response back and wonder, do they really mean it or do they just not want to give in?

Correct.

I think they just don't want to give in.

We're all secretly just thinking that when we get the response, like, come on, people.

Which would go on to one of mine where when you ask a clarifying question about something that's confusing and they just refer you back to the RFP, it's like they're holding their ground that it wasn't.

You called them out that this made no sense and they don't want to look bad. So they're going to be like per section, blah, blah, blah. It's like, yeah, that's the one that's confusing that could be interpreted multiple ways.

So it's like, doesn't matter how crafty you get with the way you write it, it just, oh, it's, or you give two options, is it this or that? And they're like, yes.

They don't know. That's just it. They pasted that from a document written in 1997.

They have no idea what it means. No one does. No one wants to admit they don't know what it means.

And here we are.

I mean, we try our best to write a really nice confirming RFI and be so polite and see if we can nudge them in the right direction. And I feel like I'm most successful on that one. It's related to font size and all the others.

I usually get kind of shot down. But I've had some good luck with getting the fonts size for graphics to be more flexible than the 12-point aerials that they may be wanting somewhere else or times.

When you submit a question.

I don't know why. It feels like maybe people are getting a little more comfortable with understanding that, yeah, an org chart or a table can have smaller font and we can read it.

I mean, if you read a construction schedule, I don't know what point font that is, but six, you know, I mean, it's pretty small.

So confession time, having worked in-house at a large general contractor for about 11 years, I did a bazillion proposals and we, it was just sort of our unspoken policy that for font limits, we would make sure that the body text was no smaller than,

you know, 11 point or whatever they said. But we would always ignore the font size when it came to charts and org charts and tables and that sort of thing.

We just never, and we never got dinged on it, but it never occurred to me that that could be something we had to think about until I came here.

I will say I have heard of other firms doing the same thing, right? It's not unheard of where we have a client that's like, well, they say that, but we never apply it to tables.

And then we have to make the judgment call, which is typically airing on the side of being safe, which means every caption is 12 points, every table in the fee schedule is all 12 points. Like, it's very big.

It's 12 point, but it's Futura. So that's how you can stick it to the man.

No, what if it's 12 point times New Roman?

Oh, right.

Yes. Sometimes they do specify.

Like, you don't want that.

I don't know. The feds still do that.

Yeah. Let us help you out.

You don't want that. Right. Yeah.

Nobody wants that. You can do that to yourself.

I feel like I'm writing a high school essay.

Double-spaced.

Right. Oh, God.

So, of the four of us here, then, I just need a quick tally. Who's in the camp that you could just only go with the body text? Like, the font size requirement is just the body text.

Becky.

Well, are you asking our personal interpretation or what we would suggest to a client? Because I feel like that's too different.

I was kind of thinking, like, what you do, what it would be your gut instinct if you didn't have all the Middle of Sixers looking over the RFP freaking out also. Like, what would you do?

We do freak out together. We do.

I'm with Becky.

Yeah.

Yeah. Well, I always followed it for everything. So that was pre-four here at Middle of Six.

So...

Yeah. Me too, Melissa. And it didn't even occur to me that I could break that rule because I think I was trained by someone who was so by the book.

And that's a really good way to be trained, by the way. You just then have to learn which things you can, which habits you can start breaking. But at least you're starting with the most conservative options.

So yeah, I think I might really be nervous for a client if they were saying that we could break that rule. They're like, okay, that's on you. I've done my advising, but sounds like if you're on the GC side, you just can do whatever you want.

Right, Becky?

Sure, it's a wild west, why not? We were very exact about other things. It's just you pick and choose what to be exact about.

What about things that we are seeing that we like, that are improving our lives, or making proposals better?

Do you have anything, anything on that list of things that are getting better?

I really like when they say not to include marketing fluff. I feel like I've seen that so many times. It must be getting plagiarized between agencies that are putting out RFPs.

They're like, oh, I like that, we should steal it. Because everybody's saying, don't include, they use the word fluff. Don't include a bunch of marketing fluff.

We don't want to see your brochures or whatever. Get right to the point. Just give us the info.

Because that tends to help us when we tell the team, like, hey, keep it short, keep it to the point, write to the project, don't give me a bunch of boilerplate. Like it helps back up our case of less is more.

You don't take offense to that marketing fluff comment?

I'm proudly fluffy, Wendy, I think. Plus, I mean, I could talk for three years about like how, you know, a color choice can like affect the entire trajectory of your business. So yeah, I'm confident enough not to be offended.

Well, I hate the phrase.

Well, that's just marketing. And I was like, okay. But you know, we don't hear that very often, not in our circles, but you hear it out in the world.

People say that. So I kind of take that fluff comment in the same way. I was like, come on, some of this is good.

What else? Anybody else see things that they like or want to encourage? Saw it one time and you would like this to be out there in the world, that it needs to be adopted?

This is not super common, but I've seen a couple times.

This is our priority. Here's what we really want to hear from you. Clarifying statement of these are, here's our values.

Please submit your proposal, ensuring that it aligns with our values, them clarifying what's actually important.

We see that a little bit with weighting structure of different sections, but when there's a little bit of expanding upon that or stating what's really important to them, it feels like, great, okay, we can find alignment, we can find some commonality.

One-page RFP. That's always nice. No requirements, no font or page or requirements or any kind like that.

That's really wonderful to see, obviously.

But I have a question. Have you ever felt like there weren't enough instructions?

No. No. I think, well, okay, maybe if there's a few instructions, like if they're really like, you know, insanely like focused and exact about a few things, but then not others, that's when you wonder, because you think, is this a trap?

Like, I mean, you were like so crazy about the page limits, but now you're not saying anything about the fonts, like yikes a little bit. But no, like, because I always, I am a bit of an eagle eye when I read through an RFP.

And if I can find a loophole, like I will find it. I love finding loopholes. I love sticking it to the man.

I love like cheating text to be smaller. Like I squeeze the letters horizontally, just enough. I'll mess with the kerning and the letting.

I mean, you know, I get a sick thrill out of that.

So like when you found that the tables didn't have to be double-spaced, but the body text did, so the whole proposal was in a table.

So I put everything in tables?

Yeah.

Sometimes you have to pivot and...

It's genius. Genius move from Becky.

Don't fence me in, you know? They need to... Honestly, though, I think a lot of these requirements, like the font requirements and the page and the margins and all that, they have in mind like a word document.

They're just going to put everything in one column, on one page, and it's in Word and whatever. But literally no one's doing that. We're all building the proposals in InDesign.

We're using columns. We're putting images in there. Oh my God, there's photographs and captions and footers and headers.

And I think... It's not that they're not thinking of that, but again, it's that copying, pasting from 1996 where nobody was thinking about that.

But if they did think about that, I think the actual workflow that the marketers are doing is very different to what the requirements themselves have in mind.

Plus Becky does whatever she wants. So that's all.

I do do that. Yeah, I go crazy, bro. Watch out.

Melissa, you must have a list of things that you would like to see more often or that made you smile when you saw it.

You're like, thank you.

I appreciate a very clear procurement schedule. When are they going to issue a adenda? When are the questions due?

When are they going to provide the answers? When are they going to shortlist? When are the interviews going to be?

When are they going to go to the council to get the approval? Like that whole full procurement, because then you have the whole picture, because that can feed into a go-no-go.

If the project manager is on vacation in Europe, then maybe this is a no-go, because he's going to miss the interview, or they got to write a schedule. So, okay, when are we supposed to start this project?

Council approval is not for three months, so we got to back that into the schedule. So I just appreciate that. And then also, okay, maybe an adenda is issued three days before the due date.

So we've kind of got this like, okay, we all know there's this little bit of limbo that they could change something at the last minute, or we're going to have a full two weeks, and then the adenda comes out, and we are good to go.

So I appreciate all of that, which some larger agencies are very clear about that. Others just have a due date, and that's it. So I like all the info.

It's going to take more than your one page RFP, more than one page, right?

Per keyword schedule can be a whole page on its own, but.

Two pages, fine.

One for submission requirements, one for the schedule.

Well, I feel like when I see a one-page RFP or two pages, that's usually kind of what I would see is, I am a little nervous. I'm like, oh, there's going to be things that I don't, I need more information.

I need a little bit more, but I'd say a sweet spot is maybe six pages. Like, okay, you chopped it way down. And I feel like I'm going to have all the info I need to get the team excited.

And I think that's actually something I look forward to, is if I read an RFP where I can tell that it hasn't been copy pasted since 1997, where there's something about the project that feels more than just the building, you know, it feels like there

was, somebody put some thought into that, gets the team excited a little bit for it, like some of the personality, one of the best ones, and I feel like I've mentioned it here before too, is like Port of Portland for their report that RFP was a dream

for their retail piece of that. I was like, wow, you just make me want to do our proposal responses for everyone who's going to participate in this, you know, it's so inspiring. And there have been others, you know, Becky, you were working on that

one. But, you know, there's a difference when you get enough info about the project to feel like you can give it something more, you know, than just the kind of the team and quals, that kind of thing.

Because then, you know, they'll be receptive to it because they're they're like, we want to we want to help small businesses and like, you don't have to meet every requirement. Come on in.

Like, you know, the whoever's on the other end of that is going to appreciate our, you know, our overly, I don't want to say fluffy now, but our our sort of like sentimental human connection, and like our interesting things, our fun copywriting, like

those extra details that we put in there to stand out. Like, I know, like, okay, that client is going to really dig this. Like, that's, yeah.

Yeah, it gives you something. I mean, I'm thinking about your short form, copywriting headlines, you know, that you kind of like gravitate to when you're working on a proposal.

And if it's so generic, and you're just kind of trying to drum up with the next school project or healthcare project or fill in the blank office TI project, something like that is going to be, there's just like, there's not much, you know, you really

have to rely on your team to be positioned and know what the client cares about. But still, even if you know what the client cares about, probably the budget and the schedule, is there enough to, you know, I don't know, is there just enough to make

the proposal really kind of like sing in that way? So which is what we're going for. We would want that if we can. So give us give us a little personality.

Tell us what you really care about. And then we can respond in kind with what we care about and see if there's a good match there. And that's kind of the goal of this whole thing anyway.

So we'll cut the marketing fluff if you could give us a little bit of something to go off of. How about that exchange?

Yeah, get them one day.

I'm making deals in this roast. Okay, well, in a normal roast, I would never do this to you all.

I'd be roasting you, too. It goes full circle. I don't have...

I'm not that kind of person. I don't have that in me, but maybe I should be turning the mic over to Becky so she can roast us.

No, thanks. I'm not easy.

I know. See, it's not as fun or easy as it sounds. But we did create the wild cards, the marketers, which is the MacGyver, the Eagle Eye, the cheerleader, the tortured artist, the head chef and the octopus.

Six marketing team members that help us get through our deadline day. And I don't know, maybe we can roast each other a little bit by calling out our wild card tendencies on proposal deadline. Becky, you get to start.

You know, I've already mentioned myself as both an Eagle Eye and a MacGyver.

I think we all have to be kind of equalized though.

So I think I lean much more towards MacGyver because, again, I will read through the fine print and I will find every loophole I possibly can and break every rule that I possibly can without totally breaking the rules.

And then when it all goes to hell on deadline day and we've got like five minutes to get the proposal submitted and InDesign's crashing, like I will come up with something. I have screenshotted pages.

I have printed things and then, you know, scanned them. I've taken photographs of things like you never know. Like sometimes I've made tabs by hand.

Sometimes that adrenaline gets going and I'm just like, yeah, whatever. The proposal is due in five minutes. Wake me up in three.

MacGyver baby all the way.

Yeah, 100%. You're very calm under pressure too. You're like, Becky, this is exploding over here.

She's like, I got it. Hold on. Give me a second.

Done. Back to you. Which is amazing.

Melissa, which of the marketers do you associate most with? Because I can see many of them in you. So curious.

Well, I think Eagle Eye.

That was something I was told or was observed about me many years ago, and I identify with that. I'm finding all of the little hidden pieces in the RFQ, and we didn't fully answer this question, the second part of the question we just ignored.

So we'll be in a meeting with a client, and they're like, well, this question's stupid. They already asked it. They just changed the phrasing a little bit.

I'm like, yes, I agree. It is stupid. So what are we going to do to answer it the second time?

Right.

You know, I'm not going to let anybody off the hook there.

You're such an eagle-eye.

You read the procurement schedule, apparently, as we learned. That's very eagle-eye. I bet you read the scope of work, too, don't you?

I sure do.

Yeah, there it is.

Yeah, I think it's really important to have an eagle-eye on the team.

Somebody needs to be that eagle-eye. I think it's good to have one on the marketing side. And one on your technical staff, too, to work together.

Because, well, as a rule follower, those rules are really important. So you got to track them.

Nope, absolutely.

Lauren Jane, which of these marketing characters are you? Are you a tortured artist?

Oh, sadly.

How does that show up on proposal deadline day?

Yeah. Well, I tend to, it's not bad, but I tend to really spend a lot of time like, oh, the kerning kind of looks funny here. I just really need to fix it.

Even if there's something else I need to triage, obviously I'll do that first. But maybe there's six hours left until deadline time. And I'm like, oh, I'll just do one more pass.

I'll just look at it one more time. What if I just nudge this over a couple pixels? I think that that balance feels better.

And sometimes it's like literally nobody is going to notice. So I end up just spending time on things that I'm like, okay, now I can feel good about this layout on this page. It's kind of funny.

And then I am kind of a cheerleader. That's what I was going to say. I really want to end on a good note.

I want everybody to feel like we did a good job. If something, God forbid, went wrong, it's like, it's all right. We're going to pull it together.

Look, we finished in a good spot. You know, I very much act as a cheerleader in that team dynamic as well.

Yeah, I see both of those for sure. Regarding the design pass, because that's kind of a phase that we take at Middle of Six. We're so lucky to have designers kind of at the ready to make sure everything looks as good as possible.

How do you decide? And Becky, you could answer too, but like, you know, when you're like, I think I really need to make a change, but this is going to impact 13 resumes.

You know, like, how do you decide what's worth it and set aside the perfectionist of the artist and be like, no?

I think we're triaging. If it is a fatal flaw, if it's going to affect points, or if there's an actual error, of course we're going to fix it.

If it is really ugly and the rest of the proposal looks really good and there's something super funky and like, dang, that needs to be fixed, most of the time I'll just go in and fix it. I've also gotten really fast.

As Becky was talking about this MacGyver thing, I thought, oh, I don't know, it's kind of me too, right?

I mean, to think that we have a little bit of all of these and all of us, but you get pretty good at being like, all right, I'm going to copy this thing.

I'm going to make the change, group it, copy it, paste it and just like, you know, you're like working so fast through that in-design document.

I'm like, okay, realistically, this will probably take me 30 minutes to fix or 45 minutes to fix, and I can totally spare that.

There have been times where I'm like, you know what, this like kind of whatever blue color isn't really pretty and I don't love it, but it's fine. And I need to like have an internal check and just let it go, which is hard.

Got to find that balance.

Yeah.

Well, we put out, I don't know, was it? I have no idea. Time at all.

I was going to guess in the summer we put out a quiz. Maybe it was in the spring. Whatever.

It was in 2025. At some point in that year, we put out a quiz for the marketers. So you could take your little self-assessment, like a Cosmo quiz is what that was modeled after.

And I think my number one and number two, I don't know which one came in which order, but the octopus and the MacGyver. And I felt like that makes a lot of sense, right?

You're kind of like tackling a whole bunch of things, keeping all the plates spinning, especially when you might have five or six or seven proposals going out once. That is me.

I don't love saying that because it doesn't feel the best, but I feel like it is a genuine AEC marketer experience. So I'll just own it and know that some of us are pretty darn good at keeping everything going. And those are our superpowers.

So you can't roast me on that. It's a superpower. Okay.

Well, were there any other things, airing of grievances regarding RFPs that you want to put out there? Maybe when this gets issued, we will send this very subtly, drop it into some agencies inboxes or something. Hey, you should listen to this.

So this is your chance. If there's anything else you wanted to say, I'll open it back up to the group. Becky, I feel like you've got probably 20 more things that you're just ready to rattle off.

Of course.

Cross-referencing. Let's not do that anymore. These giant documents that are like, see section six for the description of paragraph three, which includes the requirements from section whatever else.

No one knows what that means. Your document is just so full of itself. There's too many pages.

There's too many sections. Let's not put RFQs and RFPs in the same document. That is confusing.

No one understands that. Either with the state of Washington, we have to follow these things word for word.

You know that people who are putting out RFPs, so don't give us vague language where we have to assume things and mix it up with other things that are super strict requirements. Page size requirements, fine.

All good if you want 8 1⁄2 by 11, like go off queen.

However, if you then include a bunch of forms that are like all wildly different sizes, 11 by 17, legal, I don't know what else, 24 by 36, like those aren't going to match, those aren't going to jive.

And then Melissa has to ask the question every single dang time to find out whether or not we can have it, you know, change the page size. Can we redo the form? Let's stop doing that.

Forms are crazy. Also, let's stop asking for a bunch of boiler plate stuff that no one's going to read. We will include the right information for our projects that we want you to know.

You don't need to know like however many change orders there were on like 16 different projects. I promise no one on earth is reading that. They really aren't.

And no printed copies. Save the planet. Be the change.

Let's stop. Let's stop doing this. Let's just stop.

It's time.

Agree on all of that, for sure.

Yeah. Addresses for references, you know.

Oh, yes.

Are you writing them a letter? Is it going by carrier pigeon? Like, why?

Or fax numbers.

There was an RFP recently with, well, it was like maybe a year ago with fax numbers. And I couldn't find fax numbers for the state agencies that we needed to reference. Like, not even the state had the numbers.

This is impossible. NA, not applicable. No one has a fax anymore.

Nobody has said setting a due date over a holiday time or on a Monday.

Nobody's mentioned that yet. There's nothing worse. Like there's, you are asking people likely to work on a weekend if it's a Monday due date.

Like, dang, nobody wants that.

No matter how hard a team tries to, you know, be done on that Friday before, it is just this human nature thing. There's just another day. I always say there's hard, there is no such thing as a perfect proposal response.

There's always more that you could be doing. And if you give anyone a weekend, someone's going to use that. Please be kind.

Don't do that. Because then also for the marketing side and often for the designer side, okay, it's due on Monday and there were a handful of changes. But again, if you're like really focused on quality, it needs another pass and all that stuff.

It really can make your blood pressure rise as we're getting closer to the deadline.

Yeah, and same thing with the holidays. If it's around Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's, people are on vacation. Some companies close during the holiday.

So then you've basically forced people to work when they're supposed to be on PTO. So it's not great for us doing the work.

Mm-mm. Yeah, I know. It's like the difference between, you know, the day before Thanksgiving and the first week of December might just be a couple of work days, but it's a huge impact to people's lives.

And so, yeah, it seems wrong. Let's get over that. Well, those are some classic pet peeves.

They're gonna probably be around in two years when we come back around to this topic. Maybe we got lucky and I don't see that holiday thing ever going away, but maybe we'll see a trend.

Is there anything that you all are seeing, speaking of trends, anything that you're seeing, like changes in the RFP process or future looking that feels better with all the digital submittals?

Or I feel like I've got a couple of things and I don't know if I have enough proof to call them real trends yet, but I'm curious if you guys are seeing anything out there.

What have you got?

I feel like, and I don't know, I don't have proof, but ChatGPT or some version of the large language models, kind of making things really generically and not good in the world.

I think I'm seeing a response in the RFPs where either the client says, everything in proposals is sounding exactly the same, so please focus on these areas.

I'm like, well, it's exactly the same because people are using things like ChatGPT, which makes it all very generic, right? So that's a thing.

So then the part that is not quite a trend yet, but I wonder if it's just around the corner is way more emphasis on the interview. I mean, we already see that with the scoring.

Maybe the SOQ could be worth 30 points and the interview is worth 60 points, and then the price is worth 10 points or something, but really scoring on the interview because it's like, well, you're not sending an AI yet to go and do that piece of it,

and they just want to hear from the team. So I don't know, that's something I'm seeing just in these little picking up these bits of the language in the RFP. It's like, we don't want the fluff, we want real responses.

A couple of years ago, I responded to an RFP where they said, we want a quote from each of the project team members in their own words, not edited by marketing. That's what it said in the RFP. It was like, it was the school district.

They're like, I have to do a little editing. That's not part of my job. But you know, that kind of thing, like going for very genuine, which I support.

Well, same kind of the same vibe of, I don't know if it's a trend yet.

The trend has definitely been going to A3s, and I have seen a couple agencies then put their RFP out on an A3, and I feel like that should be required. If you want us to respond in an A3, then your RFP should be on an A3.

And with the same font size that you said we could use on that A3, and margins, all the same requirement.

All the things.

Please don't start requiring margin requirements on A3s. If you are RFP making people and you're listening, please, please, please, the only thing that allows us to cram all that content onto an A3 is the fact that we do not have margin requirements.

Don't box me in. Thank you.

Well, you heard it here. Becky would really, really like no margins. Do not constrain her and she's going to break the rules anyways.

So it's all good. Yeah. Hopefully, this is helpful for folks out there.

We're all dealing with the same things or maybe just interesting to realize, we're all in the same boat. I want to put something really wild out there into the world, but I think it would be good.

If any agency would like Middle of Six to review their RFP and needs a refresh from 1997, I'm happy to do that. I'm happy to review and advise and just give you another perspective on what might get the kind of response you're looking for.

So anyways, I'll put that out there. Done it before when I was working in-house. That was something that we actually got asked to do on occasion.

I thought that was really awesome. So who knows, maybe we can change the world just slightly with that kind of a thing. But thank you all for being brave, sharing the things you hate and the things you love about the proposal process.

And it's always fun to chat with you. Thanks everybody.

Fun to chat with you too.

This was awesome. Thank you everybody.

Thanks for having us.

The Shortlist is presented by Middle of Six. Our producer is Kyle Davis with digital marketing support by the team at Middle of Six. If you're looking for past episodes or more info, check out our podcast page at middleofsix.com/theshortlist.

You can follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram at Middle of Six. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss an episode. Until next time, keep on hustling.

Bye.

Adios.

Fare thee well.

Catch you later.

The Shortlist is a podcast that explores all things AEC marketing. Hosted by Middle of Six Principal, Wendy Simmons, each episode features members of the MOS team, where we take a deep dive on a wide range of topics related to AEC marketing including: proposal development, strategy, team building, business development, branding, digital marketing, and more. You can listen to our full archive of episodes here.