Why You're Not Landing Public Health Consulting Clients | The Dr. Des Show

Let's just dive right in on why you are not really landing clients.

It can be honestly, like any number of problems, but here are some of the top ones that I see.

Number one, you are treating RFP or proposal writing like a grant application.

And listen, my public health professionals, I love y'all, but okay, y'all know we know how to write some grants.

We know how to get in on the grant writing, right? Um, on the f- even federal contract writing.

So I will say the exception to this is federal contract writing because with federal, they of course want a little more.

You might be wr- you might be doing about 50 pages, right? But for my- for what I'm speaking about, we're talking more about non-federal contracts.

So if you're applying for a proposal that was submitted by a small nonprofit, maybe it's a nonprofit that makes about 10 million or, you know, that makes about five million a year, right? And you're submitting a proposal to them.

You do not need to submit a 50-page application because they're not gonna read it.

They're not gonna read it, okay? When you are writing proposals, you always have to keep in who is the reader? What is...

Who is the audience? Who is the target audience? Who is this going to be submitted to? Who is reading it? And a lot of times for the ones that we post in the club because they're non-federal opportunities, they are going to be people without a very technical background, without a grant writing, without a federal background, right? These are people, they're trying to scan it.

They're trying to find the right person.

They're trying to go, right? So your 50-page proposal, guess what? It's getting thrown out the window.

They are not reading that, okay? But for those who do like maybe you do a five-page proposal, maybe it's even like I've even seen some say no more than three pages.

I've seen it.

It just depends.

Always make sure you're following their guidelines.

But you want to make sure that when you're writing, we're not writing like we're trying to write a grant, right? Like we're trying to write, uh, even a federal, get a federal grant from CDC or a federal contract from CDC.

We're not writing like that, right? We're writing like we know we ha- we have the answer to the problem that they wanna solve, right? We're writing, we're making sure our language is clear.

We're making sure it's concise.

We're making sure, you know, it's visually appealing.

The document is visually appealing.

It's in our brand colors, right? It doesn't have to be all graphic designing.

It doesn't have to be, but honestly, now with AI, y'all can go on a cloud design, like you can make it whatever you wanna make it, okay? But you know, we've had that AI conversation and hopefully, you know, you've joined my AI intensive or you're considering, um, joining and potentially getting the replays, right? Because listen, y'all, AI is here, and it's going to make things so much better, even with proposal writing.

Like you can literally have an AI employee.