The head of a West-Coast money management firm finds it never hurts to give your proposal a second, third and maybe even a fourth pass before sending.

We won our first client about seven years ago. After a couple of years calling this large East Coast public fund to let them know who we were and what we were about, they issued a domestic small-cap equity RFP for $100 million.

This was our chance to get our firm on the map.

We rolled up our sleeves and put our proposal together. After a few days, we were ready to go. Feeling pretty satisfied with ourselves, we pushed our shipping deadline up from overnight to later the next day.

A final spot review of the document discovered a gap, however. In the flurry of activity, the team had overlooked a stipulation in the requirements section. We went back to fill in a response but ended up missing both our self-imposed deadline and the last shipping truck for that night.

 
We manned the phones and found a shipper that could courier the RFP out first thing the next morning; we breathed a collective sigh of relief. We’d make the deadline and now we’d have the time to do a more thorough review of the RFP.

As important as making our deadline was, it was clear we’d have to go thought the proposal again, just to make sure there weren’t any other slip-ups. Now, with a few hours to work with–and the fear of having made an omission fresh in our minds—we reviewed every line, crossed every “t,” dotted every “i” and even fine-tuned a couple of our responses.

The extra elbow-grease paid off. The fund first selected our firm as a finalist and, ultimately, awarded us the mandate.

I can’t say whether we would have been selected as a finalist, much less won the mandate, had we made our first deadline, but there’s something to be said for giving yourself enough time to complete and then review a proposal. If nothing else, you spare yourself the embarrassment of sending in shoddy work.

Do you have a story you’d like to tell?

If so, contact Senior Reporter Carl Winfield at (212) 224-3789 or cwinfield@iiintelligence.com to contribute to Road Warriors.