What Does it Really Take For Your Business to Get the Job?
By Geoff Williams

Greg Brooks, 42, figures he’s participated in or played a major role in approximately 200 public-sector bids. But the one that he played his first major role in is the one he remembers best.

Today, Brooks is co-owner with his wife, Grace, of West Third Group, a Plattsburgh, Missouri, marketing, public relations and communication firm that frequently competes for government projects. But back then, it was 1997, and Brooks, then an employee at Kiewit, a giant construction and mining company, was a key part of a $1.3 billion RFP (request for proposal), a bid for a 15-mile design-build reconstruction project of Interstate 15 through Salt Lake City. It was Brooks’ first major involvement in a government bid, and the then-32-yearold was learning from the master, a man named Jerry Pfieffer, his mentor, who he fondly refers to as “the most anal-retentive, organized person on the planet… He was an evil genius.”

It was a time, reminisces Brooks, of “war rooms, allnighters [and] clever tricks that screwed up the other bidders.” Good times. If they won the bid, Brooks would have a job handling the public relations nightmare that was sure to come as soon as commuters understood the depth of the delays and detours in store for them. If they lost, then Brooks would have missed a plum opportunity to dash up the corporate ladder.

“Typically,” says Brooks, “the idea of a good bid means neat handwriting on the bid form. I mean, your whole universe involves knowing your costs, but when you’re doing a design-build project, it’s a new beast because you’re going to partner with another company. You’re designing and building, so you’re selling Company A and Company E’s services.” And when you’re working on a project worth $1.3 billion, you want to do your best possible job, period.

So they did. These bids were presentations in front of 40 people on the review committee, so leaving nothing to chance, Brooks and about 30 coworkers put together an elaborate PowerPoint production involving numerous speakers and 200 slides. They timed it until they had everything down to a 15-second margin of error.

They didn’t stop there. Brooks and the others put out ice-cold drinking water for the audience. They gave away trinkets like pens with the company logo. They even anticipated the questions that might arise during the Q&A, so that when someone brought up a new issue, the speakers could address it and quickly pull up a new slide.

All went smoothly, and when the speech was over, Brooks and his coworkers gathered their belongings— including the pitchers of water. This unnerved the next team, which had been assuming that the Department of Transportation had provided the refreshments. The night before, Brooks had also bought the rights to all of the color copying at the local Kinko’s, in case Kiewit needed emergency printing—which had the desired effect of forcing their competition to drive 20 miles to the next copy center.

Kiewit won the right to the project. What did Brooks take away from all of this? “There were a lot of lessons,” he says. “There is no detail too small to overlook, and you can teach elephants to dance: We took engineers who were brilliant but should not be allowed in front of a podium, and we made them effective speakers.”

But maybe most important, says Brooks, “There are always three types of competitors on any job where there are multiple bidders. There’s the guy who is expected to win it. There’s the guy who it would be politically expedient to give the project to. And then there’s the guy who has so overwhelmingly anticipated all of the questions that they’re flummoxed when they stop talking to you. You want to be that last guy.”

Geoff Williams is a writer in Loveland, Ohio. Reach him at  gwilliams1@cinci.rr.com.