Meet Martha Black.
President
Proposal Writer and Manager

Martha workes remotely from home, and she has throughout her entire career. Most of her clients are in New York and New Jersey, so using Microsoft Teams, Sharepoint, and cloud-based software allows her to manage a team from anywhere.

If she needs specfic information from "the field" (i.e. a construction/clean up site) there are people that conduct physical walk-throughs and report the information back to her. Martha used to have to go to the site and meet with experts, but nowadays she attends these virtually. Anytime she is out of her office is time not spent writing, so travel is not usually a strong characteristic of the job.

How much writing and general work Martha will do in a day depends on where in the development stage she is with a proposal. For small jobs, she could have 4-5 things going on in a day. However, Martha sometimes has a superfund job, and these are large government projects that are time consuming, especially close to the due date.

Creating an inital proposal draft requires roughly 7-10 hours of writing, or about 90% of her work day. Early on in a project, the writing to collaboration ratio is about 50/50; she must read through and understand the current project, and then meet with her team in order to gather further project details, client information, cost estimates, etc. In the latter stages of development only about 10-20% of her day is spent writing, while the majority is focused on editing.

Apart from writing proposals there are administrative duties that need to be taken care of, such as meeting with clients and billing. These can be done between projects and deadlines.

Martha would broadly classify the type of writing she engages in as marketing and technical writing. While the bulk of her work consists of developing technical proposals for enviromental remediation projects, she also generates statements of qualification, assists in writing technical text for websites, and creates sales brochures and presentations.

Enviromental remediation, or enviromental cleanup, also requires special plans put in place that are dependent on the project. These can include plans for operation, protection, and quality control.

Martha works with a team for each proposal and there are various members involved for each stage of the project.

Martha emails her team a draft schedule/checklist prior to the the initial bid development meeting/submittal planning (where documents are organized and submitted for review to try and win a contract for a project). The participants usually included at this stage are her client's estimating and operations team. Because they are all in different locations, these meetings are typically held via conference call, Microsoft meeting, or Zoom.

During the meeting they discuss the project and determine what specialty subcontractors will be needed and the start/finish dates for the schedule. She adds the information to the to the schedule which is then saved to a shared (cloud-based) proposal/project folder for team members to reference. Then she emails the identified subcontractor representatives a detailed list of the information they must supply for document development, along with submittal deadlines.

As she recieves the information from various team members, Martha updates the schedule/checklist by editing the recieved data and adding it to her draft submittal document. Then initial, secondary, and final drafts of the submittal document are sent to identified team members for their own review and input as indicated on the schedule.

It is her job to identify any missing/insufficent/conflicting information within the draft documents for reviewers to address, along with incorporating the edits and additions from other teams into subsequent draft/final submittals. She remains in contact with her team members throughout the entire process to ensure that the completed final document is up to industry standards and complies with any and all regulations.

See the Document Types section for samples of the schedule and checklist.

An interesting thing that Martha has noticed during her career is that technical jobs are primarily based in Microsoft, and academic jobs prefer Apple products and software. A majority of the projects that Martha works on come from the state and federal government, which use Microsoft suites. Proposal writing software is available, but Microsoft is preferred.

In addition, she uses PDF writer software and cloud-based systems. Cloud-file sharing is imperative for such a position, because the documents she creates are so large, and this easily allows for simultaneous collaboration.

After working under these industry standards for so long, Martha has been able to create templates for the statements and plans that tend to reoccur. This allows for more efficient document creation and faster plan approval overall. She describes the templates as "living, breathing documents" that are sometimes subject to change.

It is not often that Martha needs to learn new tools or technologies, but if the need arises she will do her own research to learn about the topic before introducing it into her work.