The joy of pitching – 10 ways to get the job

I love pitches.  I like doing the pitching, and I like being pitched to.  I like getting a new brief, working out the idea that unlocks the puzzle and thinking about how to deliver it.  I like the teamwork that goes into putting a proposal together.  I like the nerves before the start and the blissed-out half  hour when it’s over.  And when I’m on the client’s side, I like seeing the different answers people offer to the same question. 

I spent a day being pitched to by PR agencies yesterday.  It was, as always, fascinating and made me think about the basic stuff everyone should remember before they fire up the PowerPoint and go:  

1. Answer the brief you’ve been given – not the one you’d like to have been given.  But…

2. Think outside the brief.  What is the client looking for beyond what’s actually in the tender document?  Longevity? New relationships? Skills transfers from your team to theirs? Can you see the thing they need that they don’t even know they want yet? Tell them about it.

3. Be surprising.  Don’t put in the first thing you think of, that’s likely to be the dullest answer – and the one everyone else comes up with.  Use the flash of inspiration that comes next, when your brain’s had time to mull over the problem for  a while.  That’s the answer that’s authentically yours, the one no-one else will think of.

4.  Be yourself.  You’re going to be working closely with your new clients, they need to be comfortable that you’re going to get on.

5. Get as much information as you can about the client and their industry before you start. ALWAYS go to the Q&A session if there’s one on offer – it’s not only polite, it also might offer you the vital clue you need to tackle the brief.  And you need to know what your competitors know, too. 

6. Don’t expect your audience to be mind-readers.  You might think it’s obvious that you’ll cover the nuts and bolts of the job, but if you don’t say you will your clients might think you can’t be bothered with the basics.

7. Show you’ve thought about the audience – being able to build and manage new channels or produce celebrities at the drop of a hat is only impressive if they’re the right channels – and celebrities – to reach the audience the client wants to talk to.  This isn’t an opportunity to show off everything you know, it’s a chance to show how cleverly you can match your expertise to your potential client’s needs.

8. Show you’ve thought about the audience in the room, too.  As the client, it’s hard to concentrate when you’re watching four or five PowerPoint presentations in a row.  Mix up how you present – use props, good visuals, video, audio – one of the best presentations I’ve seen (not from yesterday’s crop) included filmed vox pops with the target audience to show that the agency knew who they needed to talk to and understood the issues.  Be entertaining, be conversational, be enthusiastic, look people in the eye, SMILE.  (Oh, and if you’re going to use PowerPoint, check your spelling and find someone who knows how to use apostrophes to give it the once over.) 

9.  Think on your feet.  The client’s questions at the end inevitably bring up issues you haven’t thought of – else you’d have put them in the presentation and they wouldn’t ask the question.  Working out an answer as you speak, asking them questions to clarify what they mean  and picking up the clues they give out are just as important as hitting on the “right” answer.  Your job is to prove that you’re quick on the uptake and flexible enough to cope with new ideas.

10.  Don’t forget about the numbers – budget breakdowns, evaluation methods, targets.  They may be broad, and you might have to qualify them later, but they’ll help the client understand that you care about being business-like as well as being creative.

And that’s all there is to it. 

They were a good bunch yesterday.  Now, I need to stop prevaricating and work out who I’m going to recommend gets the job…

Is this the end of interims in government?

A declaration of interest that feels like a confession:

My name is Penny and I have provided consultancy services for the public sector through my own company.  There, I’ve said it.  I’ve done work for the government without being on the permanent payroll. Which puts me beyond the pale, if you’ve been following recent exposes on consultancy among the senior civil service.

When is a consultant not a consultant?

Let’s start –  as any good civil servant would -  by defining our terms. Interim managers are not necessarily the same as consultants who are not necessarily the same as freelancers or temps.  However, all of us seem to be boiling in the same pot as far as the papers are concerned.   I’m taking heart from the belief that the papers don’t have their sights on people like me (though it’s hard to be sure).

They’re  concerned with people trousering six-figure pay cheques, who are effectively full-time civil servants but are paid as consultants.  One case  was a senior manager who’s been in post since 2007.  If true, it’s hard to argue that he is anything other than a government employee who should be paid accordingly.

My case is different. In both cases where I’ve worked as a consultant in government (one 6 month stint, one about 8 months) I’ve worked on projects that didn’t exist before I was hired to set them up and where the required skills hadn’t been found in-house.  I didn’t take over an existing job or manage full-time staff (consultants aren’t allowed to, I wonder how they’ve been getting round that one since 2007?)  In both cases I left once the projects were completed.

I suspect that employing me that way saved taxpayers a fair bit. They didn’t   contribute to my pension for example, or pay employer’s NI contributions, or  holiday pay or sick pay.  The day the projects ended so did the money – no redundancy package to cushion the blow and no help getting another job. My conscience is clear.

There’s a role for interims in government

The civil service employment story has moved on to bemoan the rising cost of redundancies and the corresponding number of people being taken on through agencies to fill the gaps. I now learn, thanks to a storming series of posts on this issue at Flipchart Fairytales, that the use of interim managers in government may be about to end completely.

Well.  I’m all for protecting the employment rights of those in work, and questioned the wisdom of cutting the civil service when massive changes are being made to how public services are delivered.   But it’s not as simple as saying permanent staff = good: interim managers/ freelance consultants = spawn of the Devil.

First, pushing permanent civil servants out of the front door while bringing  freelancers in through the back is only evidence of poor planning if the jobs the two groups are doing are the same.  Bringing in agency temps because staff cuts have been made over-hastily is clearly not good.

But I know from experience that there is a superfluity of general administrators in the civil service  and a lack of specialist skills in some key areas.  Interim managers or specialist consultants offer a flexible, highly skilled resource for government (or any other employer) to deliver specific projects, where there is an acute need for good quality, specialist management  NOW.

The importance of workforce planning

Whitehall has, frankly, never been great at workforce planning.  I went to a  seminar last year given by the head of the team which worked in the Home Office, planning a structured approach to matching the recruitment and retention strategy to their projected future business.  Until that sort of long-term strategic planning becomes the norm in government departments I suspect there will always be a need for interim managers to step into the breach.  Cutting themselves adrift from potential help because the papers disapprove of interim employment arrangements doesn’t seem like good business sense to me.

101 words of advice – resisting vanity projects

Countless wild-goose chases start with a CEO saying: “I’m not a comms expert, but I think we need a video (or a new microsite, or a leaflet, or an event).”  This translates as: “I’ve had an idea worth sharing with the world.  Make it so.”

Unless it is a good idea and you’re resisting out of pique because you didn’t think of it, refuse.  Firmly. 

It won’t fit the strategy, will generate work, deplete your budget and be forgotten by everyone – including the CEO – within a week.  Tell them straight (maybe not the last bit).  You are the comms expert.  They should listen.

Coping when consultants come a-calling

Or:  I am a consultant.  You are meddling in my job.  He/she/they are  exploiting the boss’s gullibility…

Odd experience of being on both ends of the consultant/consultee equation recently, with unsettling results.

First the background.  I’m providing communications support for a big  change programme in a company which has brought in one of the big 4 consulting firms to deliver the technical stuff.  As part of their standard pack the firm offers support with comms, so I had a meeting the other day with a consultant who has theoretically been brought in to do  work I was brought in to deliver.

Starting the meeting with an open mind, I found my hackles rising when she started by telling me what a comms strategy is and how to plan one.  Every time she suggested things I’d already done my jaw clenched a little harder.  Eventually we agreed, amicably,  that  my specialism was comms – and I probably had ten years’ more experience in the field than she did; hers was programme planning – and dashboards bring me out in a rash,  so we’d split the job along those lines and get on with it.  Which we have, perfectly happily ever since.

Scoot on a couple of days.  I am also providing comms planning support for another client who wants to re-focus the work being done in the department she’s just been brought in to lead.  We had a team meeting last week.  Knowing that I can be  – ahem – forceful when I’ve got the bit between my teeth, I really tried to stress how much I understood their problems and recognised the great work they were doing against the odds before getting into the  “what might we need to do to improve matters?” stuff.  Heard yesterday from my client that they just felt undermined by the criticism they felt I doled out.

Now, I feel genuinely bad about that – even though I know the team isn’t firing on all cylinders, and so do they – so something has to change.  It’s never nice to feel that you’ve made someone’s working day worse.  But it’s a good reminder of a lesson I’ve been learning since the beginning of my career – it never does to take things personally.   

The consultant talking to me should have started by asking where we were on the job before she leapt in with the assumption that nothing was happening – but she wasn’t criticising me personally, she just didn’t know what I’d done.  It was pointless getting cross about it.  The team I met last week evidently didn’t hear any of the good stuff about themselves, they just took away a sense that it’s not good enough.  There’s a lesson there for me about framing what I’m saying, but equally it’s worth remembering that however hard you try, some people will only hear criticism, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

2011: 5 lessons from a hard year in business

It’s hardly the Office of National Statistics’ survey of the national accounts, but I’ve been spending the last semi-working day of the year looking at some figures for my business which showed: 

1.  I’ve worked more days – at a slightly lower day rate – for more clients this year than last.  Which surprises me.  If you’d asked  before I looked at the numbers, I’d have said this year was the worst ever.  In fact, with a full quarter still to come, I can see I’ll end the year  up in both days billed and income generated. Possibly it has just felt harder, coming after the long slog of 2010/11, which left reserves of both cash and bulldog spirit at an all-time low.

2.  But, I’ve got an awful long way to go before I return to the glory days of  my personal annus mirabilis - 2008/09 - when the global economy tanked but mine soared.

3. My business suffered from being too closely entangled with the public sector.  I was cushioned through ’08/’09 by a government commited to  spending to ward off a slump (thanks Gordon).  Things slowed down immediately after the general election.  It’s been a high price to pay for not taking my own good advice to spread the work around (though in fairness I saw the crash coming, I just wasn’t able to avoid it).  It takes a while to change direction – even for a tiny business like mine - it’s not just a matter of developing new contacts, it’s also a question of changing people’s perceptions of what you can do.  No wonder there’s been  a boom in advice for ex-public sector bods trying to join the private sector. 

4. The good news, though is that in the world of micro-businesses the difference between a good year and a terrible one can be just one contract.  This year has been improved by two new clients offering several months’-worth of work each.  The thing to cling to during the troughs in business is that one phone call can turn things round. 

5.  I’m not the only one to have found trading tough.  Some clients I got lots of work from in the early days have disappeared completely.  Only one client I worked for last year has used me in the last 9 months, all the other business has come from new leads.  If nothing else this highlights the importance of marketing your business and expanding your network of contacts.

However, comparing “now” with “then”  already feels like an academic exercise. As an SME-owning friend said at the weekend:  the world has  changed.  There’s no point worrying that you no longer know you’re going to be booked out for the next six months.  It’s not going to happen in the foreseeable future, and we’ve just got to make the best of it.  The trick, for freelancers like me at least, is to diversify – to develop new skills and ever-wider networks, to get better at seeing where new opportunities are coming from and to be flexible enough to grab them.  I can see some light at the end of the tunnel – do these points ring true for anyone else?

101 words of advice: how to handle debt

From  recent personal experience – as the disgruntled supplier – I suggest:

If they owe you

• Be reasonable.  Times are tough, people generally do the decent thing.  Anyway hitting hurricane force immediately leaves nowhere to go.
• Be persistent.
• Know your rights.

If you owe them:

• Don’t hide.  Ignoring email, phone messages or carrier pigeons sent to chase the debt won’t work.  Like Arnie, they’ll be back.  Keeping people in the dark  infuriates them.  There’s good advice here.
• Be honest, explain, offer to pay a bit at a time to show good will.
• Get  help.
• Remember, no-one believes “the cheque’s in the post”.

 

What recruitment consultants don’t tell you about job hunting

A good recruitment consultant is one who is honest about what he or she can do for you.  The best ones tell you the truth: you are far more likely to get a job through your own network than you are through the efforts of even the best recruitment consultant.

Can recruitment consultants help?

I mix freelance projects with longer interim posts so I’m a bit of a recruitment consultant connoisseur.  There are lots who specialise in placing interim managers .  Some are brilliant – finding out my strengths and skills, asking where I want to work and what’s important to me, keeping in touch.  The best one I’ve come across is happy to share my details with partner agencies if she feels they might have clients who can use me, knowing  they will reciprocate.

The bad ones are woeful.  ”Never mind the quality, feel the width” they  cry, as they pitch CVs by the bucket-full at clients, in the hope that somewhere in the human mix is a round-ish peg for the round hole they’re trying to fill.  They’re generally easy to spot – they don’t return calls, give no feedback on  applications, suggest you exaggerate the rates you charged in a previous role so that “you’ll be taken more seriously” and NEVER counsel you that, on reflection, the role they’re filling doesn’t meet your needs (or that you don’t fit the client’s).  It’s disappointing to come across one of them, it shouldn’t be surprising.  Recruitment consultancies work for the companies that hire them, not the candidates they place.  We’re the raw materials.

Working your personal network

There’s loads of advice online for getting the best out of a  recruitment consultant and it’s worth working at – I say again, many of them are excellent and great sources of support and advice.  The web also bristles with job-hunting guides.  I liked the self-explanatory 49 Best Ways To Get A Job in Today’s Horrible Economy. But I’ve had more leads on actual, chargeable work through personal networking and recommendations from previous clients than  any consultancy. This makes LinkedIn and other social networks the most valuable job-hunting tools you can wield these days.  This classic advice still holds good, even though 2009 sounds as distant as the Middle Ages in communications now.

Private profit vs employees’ rights

When I moved to London to seek my fame and fortune I worked as a temp, making tea for the Head of HR at Channel 4.    I’d graduated to picking up dry-cleaning for the Head of Comms before  I landed a job in the press office.  I loved every minute of it – just as well as I “temped” there for almost a year.  Since then I’ve been a self-employed consultant and an interim manager  in a range of organisations, so I’ve spent almost half of my working life without benefit of holiday pay, sick pay or employers’ pension contributions.  This has been my choice and I’m not looking for sympathy, but it does mean that I know a bit about what it’s like at the sharp end of what is usually referred to as Britain’s flexible labour market. 

New regulations to drown temp industry?

New regulations coming in this October will give temps and agency workers greater employment protection after they’ve been working for a company for 12 weeks.  Or, as the Telegraph put it: New regulations will drown temp industry.   

Warning that unemployment will rise as companies off-load temps they can’t afford, the Telegraph warns that fewer jobs will now be created.

“No regulations and no left-wing shit”

I’d expect the Telegraph to back the bosses, so the opposition didn’t surprise me.  I’d argue that if you’re temping for a company for three months you’re doing a job not providing holiday cover, so you ought to have the same rights as your permanently employed colleague at the next desk.  One of the comments underneath the story is a bit of an eye-opener though: 

It’s better to have a chat with agency staff, cut out the middleman and give everyone a better cash deal.  This is what I do.  No employment regs, no nonsense and no left-wing shit.  Any problems and the company will start up next week with a slightly different name.

Let’s pass over thoughts of how that “better cash deal” might be administered, and ask instead – when did offering reasonable employment protection to working people become “left-wing shit”?  Are we really saying that nothing is as important as maximizing profit?  That only bleeding heart liberals care about people’s rights? 

Maybe the fact that I’m reading Chavs at the moment made the comment leap out at me.  Here’s author Owen Jones on the rise and rise of the “flexible workforce”:

We have been witnessing the slow death of the secure, full-time job,  There are up to 1.5million temporary workers in Britain.  A “temp” can be hired and fired at an hour’s notice, paid less for doing the same job and lacks rights such as paid holiday and redundancy pay.  Agency work is thriving in the service sector, but an incident at a car plant near Oxford in early 2009 illustrates where the rise of the temp has brought us.  Eight hundred and fifty temps – many of whom had worked in the factory for years – were sacked by BMW with just one hour’s notice … The workers, with no means of defending themselves from this calamity resorted to pelting managers with apples and oranges  … It’s not just agency and temporary workers who suffer because of job insecurity and outrageous terms and conditions.  Fellow workers are forced to compete with people who can be hired far more cheaply. Everyone’s wages are pushed down as a result.  This is the race to the bottom of pay and conditions.” 

Agency Workers Regulations 2011

For anyone interested, here’s the TUC’s guide to agency workers’ rights   and guidance on the Agency Workers Regulations which come into force in October.  And for the record, I’m with the bleeding heart liberals on this one.

The NI guide to crisis communications in 5 easy steps

In years to come the News International phone hacking saga will be taught on PR courses as a textbook case of how not to handle a PR crisis.  Here’s why:

1.  Caught in a crisis the response should  be quick, consistent and open.  NI let the story about hacking rumble on for months, claiming all the while that it was a problem with one rogue operator.  Sticking to an incomplete story is a guarantee of greater problems down the line when the full story comes out.  Which it will.  ’Fess up straight away if you’re in the wrong, it gives you some control over the story if it isn’t dribbling out over a long period as new allegations arise.  Most experts agree that  an attempted cover up can cause bigger headaches than the original sin.

2. If you’re in the wrong, apologise – fully and sincerely, and start talking about what changes you’re going to make to ensure that this never happens again. Presumably under the influence of their new PR company, NI are now set to run full-page ads in the papers apologising for what’s happening.  Rebekah Brooks’ initial statement declaring that it was inconceivable that she knew about hacking Milly Dowler’s phone fell several miles short of what was required.

Until the new PRs got to work, there hadn’t been much in the way of apology to the victims from anyone at NI.  Today’s meeting between Rupert Murdoch and Milly Dowler’s family may be a first step to recognising that this is a tactical mistake (as well as being morally indefensible…) 

3. A bit of humility doesn’t hurt.  James Murdoch’s refusal to appear before the  Select Committee because the date was inconvenient was cringeworthy. Worse was Rupert’s apparent insistence to the Wall St Journal that the company had been handling the issue extremely well.

4.  Think about the information that everyone involved will need.  This includes regulators, customers, investors, suppliers, victims  and – a crucial group that NI has rather ignored – your own staff.  Former News of the World staff, sacked a week before Rebekah Brooks felt compelled to go, may feel this element of the crisis could have been better handled… 

and most importantly

5. You need to be prepared.  NI don’t seem to have had a Head of Comms working on this until this January. so no wonder their responses have been flat-footed.  It’s worth:

• Having a regular health check of the business to see where problems might arise and do scenario planning to see how you’d cope if the worst happened
• Having a  team in place to manage a crisis, with people who are sufficiently senior to be able to take quick decisions without having to refer to managers
• Identifying a media-trained spokesperson to deal with enquiries to ensure a consistent message gets through
• Remembering the power of the non-traditional media.  Think how you’d deal with Twitter or Facebook in full flow…
• Practising.  Running the odd “pretend crisis” session will test the systems you’ve put in place and make sure they’re robust. 

Does blogging drive business?

Boozy lunch last weekend with an old friend who is just dipping a toe into online promotion for his construction business.  He’s getting his first website up and running soon and is thinking about a blog – though he’s not really sure why he might need one.  My answer to the question – so why have you got  a blog? –  may not have helped:

• I enjoy writing it – especially now I’ve been writing for a while and there’s an archive of stuff to look back on.  I don’t feel as strongly about writing as Caitlin Moran, who confesses to salivating at the thought of sitting at the keyboard, but it’s definitely in my top five list of favourite things to do.
• It acts as a shop window for me.  Part of what I offer clients is my ability as a copywriter, the blog lets them see me in action, writing on lots of different subjects.
• It gives me a space to think.  It’s somewhere to gather advice and information about business and my particular sector, weight it up and tease issues into shape in my head through the process of writing about them (there are lots of posts which have been deleted unpublished because I realised half way through that I was barking up entirely the wrong tree).

I think having the blog helps my business enormously – although none of the reasons I do it are directly aimed at increasing turnover.  There are lots of other ways of driving business online.  I’m tempted to agree with whoever it was who said that if you blog you do it for yourself.  If anyone else reads it, it’s a bonus.