If it's worth doing...it's worth doing a spell

My mom told me that if something is worth doing then it's worth doing well. Larissa Cornelius must have had the same advice because she has now won nFold's proposal award for excellence no less than THREE years in a row. Our judges are UK Proposal Rock Star Jon Williams, US Proposal Guru Tom Sant, and our own Proposal Queen Sandy Pullinger. They unanimously agree that Larissa has what it takes to win. So this year nFold gave her a cheezy trophy to recognize her outstanding achievement. I asked her to take a selfie for my blog. I'm sure she's hiding a magic wand somewhere, because this is the best selfie I've seen in a long while - plus both her hands are showing.

 

 

nFold announced the results of the local proposal manager salary survey at the APMP event in September. Can you believe that the average proposal manager is female, 43 years old, with 9 years of proposal experience, and is highly likely to live in Gauteng and be permanently employed? At the ripe old age of 314, I guess I may bring up the average age a bit...which reminds me.

 

Hooray, I finally made it out of my box on my birthday. I took this picture of the Standard Bank proposal team at nFold's story board master class. This year's finalist in nFold's proposal award, Tracy-Ann Damons is on the far left, toasting my health with the team. Happy Birthday to me!

 

In the middle of the picture is Sandy's new mentee, Alicia Sibanda. She's the very first learner to take part in the job creation programme that nFold, EOH and APMP have started. She went along with Sandy to the book launch for 'The Climb' by KK Diaz, now safely returned from Mt Kilimanjaro. He says he climbed the mountain with no money and no experience to rob people of their excuses. Hence the hash tags.

Sandy loved the book so much that she got KK to share his lessons learned as the guest speaker at nFold's breakfast, in aid of his charity E4+C (entrepreneurs for positive change). She bought 100 books for KK to donate to a school so that he could share his message with the entrepreneurs of tomorrow, and he matched her donation by speaking at another school too. What a wonderful person...KK doesn't need a wand to make magic.

 

At the Spring Breakfast, Sandy spoke about how proposals create jobs. It was a sparkling event with scintillating company. So, alas Sandy had no excuse to dress up as the archer queen from Clash of Clans like she did for the APMP Conference. Her topic was 'strategies that win' and her analogy relating it back to the addictive online game kept everyone awake after lunch.

She re-used the costume to go trick-or-treating at Halloween. I bet she got a lot of candy. I love that purple hair!

 

 

 

Flying off the handle

I'm not angry, but I literally flew off the handle of a camera stand at the Executive Summaries master class that nFold hosted in February. Here I am with global proposal star Jon Williams who presented the session. Glowing praise flew in as fast as my broomstick.

"The energy was great. Content was relevant and plain excellent."
"Straight to the point.  Lots of passion."
"Jon was fantastic. Content was relevant."

Jon taught us all about the role of executive summaries, how to structure a good one, and touched on the sections of proposal related to the executive summary. He used some great examples and stories to bring the show to life. If the executive summaries in your company suck, it's a pity you missed out on this one.

nFold really made the most of Jon's time in sunny SA. He presented on the topic of "Auditing Proposal Quality" to the local chapter of APMP. The benchmarking technique he showed us is easy to implement and very effective.

Jon also mentored Sandy to become an accredited trainer for APMP Foundation level under the banner of Strategic Proposals. 6 more people passed the foundation exam, bringing the total number of local APMP members to achieve this globally recognized standard, up to more than 50.

Jon had lunch with a bunch of people from the nFold bid network before heading back to snowy London. Brrr! I bet he misses the sunshine.

And now for something completely different, to quote Monty Python. I haven't seen much of Sandy or Theresa lately. They've been up to all sorts of mischief. nFold has projects waltzing in so quickly that Johan Strauss would have a hard time keeping up with them. They were even too busy to move into new offices. So I never got a chance to paint those walls. Sigh. Maybe sometime soon...

I finally caught up with Sandy helping new customers use Qvidian. She took me along to her latest Qvidian training session. Here I am, getting up close and personal with some of the delegates. I bet their proposals are whizzing out of Qvidian as fast as you can say Wendy Word.