How Not To Lose The RFP

RFPs are a competitive process that can cost you a lot of time and money chasing a project that you might never win. Most of the time, it's best to walk away.

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Congratulations independent consultant, you’ve been invited to participate in an RFP (request for proposal) for a large organisation.

The prize can be anything from $50k to $250k (or tens of millions of dollars for the big firms - but we’ll skip these for now).

You can probably feel your excitement level rising already. That’s a big payday for you - especially if you’ve been surviving on smaller contracts for a while.

Alas, you should probably say ‘no thanks’ and walk away from the process.

This has been our default response to around 80% of the RFPs we’re invited to participate in. We’ve had some good success recently, but that’s borne from plenty of hard lessons over the years (we’ll cover the secrets of winning an RFP in a different post).

Let’s go through the reasons why you should probably walk aw…