Here’s a quick video giving my initial impression of Million Dollar Consulting Proposals by Alan Weiss. I started reading this book (Kindle edition – grab it here) on a flight the other day. Full review will be up in due course.
Here’s a transcript of the video if you’d rather read:
Hey guys, what’s up today? I want to talk about a Kindle book I’m reading at the moment. I give you a quick review of it. It’s called Million Dollar Consulting Proposals and by a guy called Alan Weiss. I’m reading it on Kindle. See here that’s Kindle Paperwhite which is probably one of my favorite devices ever made. Super, super good to be able to go everywhere you want with a whole lot of books. But anyway, Million Dollar Consulting Proposals had a write a proposal that’s accepted every time. And Alan Weiss was famous, most rose to prominence I think for doing a book quite some time ago. I think in the early ’90s it was originally released called Million Dollar Consulting.
And basically Million Dollar Consulting was … it’s hugely well reviewed. I’m just checking it out here on Amazon. It sold a lot of copies. Four and a half star reviews. Something that that I actually want to rate this one as well. But I started with Million Dollar Consulting Proposals just because I saw it recommended on my Kindle list and it was cheap and it came up for sale. So I started reading it while I went away on holiday the other day. Basically for a book I think it was released in 2011 or the addition I’ve got according to Amazon. It’s really, really good. I mean if you’re interested in doing high end consulting or high end freelancing and getting away from that I guess sort of low quality kind of stuff that plagues the industry and that can make it really hard to make money well this book will help you.
And how it’ll help you is by getting you in the mindset to understand what you need to do with proposals. So basically Alan Weiss, his opinion and sorry if I’ve pronounced your name wrong, his opinion is that most proposals are done wrong. I think he’s probably right. But what tends to happen with proposals they’re long winded. They’re drawn out. They’re boring. It tells the client things they already know or that they don’t need to know. Whereas his whole sort of ethos is you should be creating pretty straightforward and simple proposals quickly that basically establish the value and sort of really I guess ground the relationship that you’ve already built so that the proposal becomes less of this massive hurdle. It’s not, oh now I’ve talked to this prospective client for an hour on the phone today and now I’ve got to go and do 50-page proposal. No, instead you basically agree on the deal first and the proposal’s just formalizing that agreement.
And really throughout the book what Alan’s done is lay out examples from his own work and client’s he’s worked with. There’s lots of anecdotes but there’s also lots of practical steps as well like workbook style examples of things too. And overall I’m a big fan of this book. I haven’t quite finished it yet. I’ll do a final review and publish that to my Reviews Boss channel when I’m completely finished. But look he knows his stuff. If you could jump on amazon.com for example and look at … I’m just looking at it now, looking at the range of books he’s done. He’s got very good reviews. He was a … Alan Weiss was not necessarily a pioneer, I don’t know enough about the history of who came up with the stuff. But there’s a famous book called Value Based Fees: How to Charge and Get What You’re Worth. That’s probably one of his most famous ones along with the Million Dollar Consulting Guide as well.
So basically if you look at the blurb on the Amazon Kindle page or book page, Million Dollar Consulting Proposals forever ends the time consuming and often frustrating process of writing a consulting proposal. And it’s true. It’s such a frustrating process. And I know this from my own consulting and freelancing and I know it from having worked at agencies as well. It absolutely sucks. It’s such a pain doing proposals often because as Alan states, they’re done the wrong way. Basically what you should be doing, you should be agreeing pretty much in principle first what you’re going to do and then you create the proposal based on that rather than sort of leaving the prospective client hanging and saying … and then presenting them with this proposal that is probably a step too far or puts them off or oh we didn’t agree with that.
So, whether you’re starting out whether you’ve been doing consulting or freelancing for a while, I would really recommend this. The current price as I speak right now is $17.83 for Kindle, $18.57 for the paperback. It’s cheap. It won’t take you too long to read. I’ve read almost all of it on a flight across to Australia the other day and a bit on the way home. But there’s really, really hard hitting good information in there about improving your proposals. And basically … yeah, it gets you into the mindset about thinking about things in the right way.
So thinking about value for your pricing instead of pricing time or tasks or whatever which is a hard thing to get your head around. But it does create especially for genuine consultants, if you can do the work in an hour and deliver just as much value as the guy who does the work in 100 hours, as long as the value is equal well why shouldn’t you be paid the same amount or potentially more. In fact you should really be paid more because you’ve been so efficient and you’ve tied up less of your client’s time as well.
It goes into all these kinds of things but the main focus is on how to structure and present your proposals and such a way that really, really enhances your value proposition and makes you stand out from the competition and hopefully allows you to charge those higher fees. All of his other books I haven’t read any of them yet but they seem to be really about upping your game and not being one of those consultants or freelancers who scraped by and rarely make a living. This is all about … you’re charging what you’re worth. And if you’re genuinely delivering value you should be charging a decent amount, but it shouldn’t matter to the client because at the end of the day even if you charge … If you charge $1 million and you deliver $2 million value to the client, well they’ve got a better deal than if you charged them $10,000 and they only got $5000 value.
Million Dollar Consulting Proposals is a very, very good book. I haven’t quite finished it. When I finish it properly I’ll post a link to my reviewsboss.com review which is where I do really detailed breakdowns. But my initial impressions are it’s a really good book and I do recommend you check it out if you’re interested in consulting.