Learn to Create a Disciplined and Repeatable Writing Process

And welcome to our final session of Optimize twenty-three business writing. What a fabulous day it has been. We have had this is our eleventh talk that we’re about to start. We’ve touched on so many great topics from AI to measurement to proposal writing to storytelling. We’ve really touched on so many different things. Before I begin, I’m going to thank all the speakers that have been involved. It’s just been a fantastic day. We’ve learned so much. And thank you all for joining this final session, and it’s a real good one. It’s a real summary of the entire day. We’re delighted to have Shipley involved. We’re delighted to have Brad Douglas here today. Before we start, just a little bit of housekeeping. If this is your first session, we do have a Q&A box on the screen where you can ask questions directly to Brad. We’re going to tackle the questions as we go, so feel free to bring in questions. We also have an attendee chat. Feel free to tell us how many sessions you’ve gone to today, and what’s been your favorite session. Feel free to knock that into the chat, and we can chat away there. If you do have any questions or anything for VisibleThread, feel free to put it into the Q&A box. I’m more than happy to help you. So, without further ado, I’m going to pass you to Brad Douglas of Shipley. Brad, how are you today? Doing fantastic. Thanks. And I know it’s been a long day for those that have been involved all day. So nice to be a part of this. Thank you. You’re very good. This is a great session. So, Brad has kindly offered to talk about almost the proposal writing process from start to finish, and there’s lots of summarized slides here of similar things we have talked about already today. So, I think it’s a great presentation to finish off with. So, Brad, I’ll let you take over from here. Okay. I’m going to just start by asking a real simple math question. No using ChatGPT or any of the artificial intelligence stuff we’ve talked about. I want everyone who’s on just to no cheating. Just here’s a simple math problem and chat the answer in the chat box without calculating it on your phone. What is the answer to two plus ten divided by two? Two plus ten divided by two. Chat the answer in the chat box. Can you read off the answers? I’m not seeing those pop up. What are we getting? Not yet. Seven, I have. Six and seven. Six and seven? Wait. How can there be two answers? We’re pretty smart people. Right? Sixes and sevens? Yeah. About equally split. Okay. Well, this is about a third or fourth grade if you’re in the US math problem. And here we are, a bunch of smart adults, and we can’t agree on the answer to this math problem. And there’s some actually correlation between this and what we were going to wrap up with today; there’s more than one right answer. There is no one single cookie-cutter way to prepare for or do a proposal or any other type of document. So back to the math problem, the reason we’re getting different answers is there’s a fundamental principle of mathematics that says you’re supposed to apply the order of operations when you do math. You’re supposed to multiply or divide before you add or subtract. If we apply that premise, that principle of math, the answer is seven. Ten divided by two is five plus two is seven. If we forget that principle and we throw it out and we ignore it, we get a completely different answer. And so, if we just go left to right, we’re going to get six. So, the point is there is no one single way to do a proposal. There’s more than one right answer, but there are simple certain principles of winning work, competing for business that make all the difference in the world. And that’s what this whole day has been about. This whole day has been full of great ideas, concepts, techniques, principles that if we apply, we’re going to win more business, as a group. So, let’s talk about this repeatable writing approach. This will be a review for many of you who are familiar with Shipley and maybe some have attended some of our training programs. We’ve created this mnemonic. And I know it sounds simple and maybe overly simple for some. But POWER. Plan, Organize, Write, Examine, and Revise. And that’s what we’re going to talk about. And, again, this is mostly a refresher, based on what’s going on if you’ve been in other sessions today. But these simple words are like that math principle. They’re the foundation. If we will do this, if we will coach our teams and mentor our people, if we will help them plan and organize and then write and then examine and then revise, we have a much better chance of being compliant like Ginny talked about and being responsive and being focused on the customer and telling the story. So that’s what we want to go through is just a quick review of POWER, Plan, Organize, Write, Examine and Revise. And this is what some of our teams need. They need something like this, a repeatable, memorable mnemonic that will help them work through the proposal process. So here you see each of those. And I know those that are interested, will go back, and you can review this. You can print it off. This is a fantastic idea for a brown bag session for your teams. This is a fantastic way to present to our technical teams, our solution architects, our SMEs on how they can contribute to a proposal, a winning proposal document. Unless we teach this, unless we put this out to our teams, there’s more than just putting fingers to keyboard to writing a good proposal section or writing a good answer to an RFP question or questionnaire. We’ve got to think it through. And so, some of the panelists right before this session and in some of the other sessions, we talked a little bit about the strategy of writing. That’s what the planning and organizing is. It’s all about the strategic thinking that goes into our proposals. So here you see bulleted lists, and we obviously, this could be a whole half-day explanation of what this POWER approach represents. We’ll go through each of those briefly. We’ve talked about and again, I’ll reinforce there are different purposes. There are different ways to organize. There’s different audiences and different reader intents for the different kinds of documents we produce. So, there’s technical documents. There are proposal documents. There are sections within our proposals. There’s the executive summary. There’s the management approach, the technical approach, the cost volume, the past performance write-ups, and volumes. Each of these types of documents has different reader intent and audience, and they may need to be organized differently and different purposes. The purpose of a proposal is obvious. We are trying to sell a solution in our organization to a prospective customer or an existing customer. So different purposes for different types of documents. There was a great session earlier today if you participated in it in storytelling. And the message there was so perfect. A proposal is not just a story, but it’s a persuasive story. It’s designed to help the customer select us. So, you see the difference here graphically. When we’re writing a story, and the presenter talked about this idea of, you know, every so often in a story, there’s a main point, a climax. Same with a proposal. We must be very compelling at every single section, every subsection of our proposal. But a story typically builds up to some kind of ending, sometimes happily ever after, I think was mentioned earlier. A proposal, though, we’ve got to start with the most important idea first. The bottom-line up front. What matters to the customer? What are they going to get out of our proposed solution? So, it’s a little bit different than storytelling. It is telling a story, but in a different way. Jenny, nice job, I thought, on the panel too, and Julia and Natalia. We’ve categorized what makes an effective proposal? What makes it persuasive and compelling? And APMP would align with this as well. These are the real seven indicators that we need to focus on when we’re working with proposal documents and with proposal teams. Notice at the top, compliance. We must absolutely be compliant as was said earlier. We must be responsive. We must go beyond compliance, and we have to actually address the underlying objectives. What is the US Air Force? What is the Department of Treasury? What are they trying to accomplish by putting out a solicitation? What’s the underlying beyond the requirements? That’s what we mean by being responsive. Strategic focus, competitive focus, the quality of writing. That’s been the focus of a lot of these sessions today, which have been fantastic. We haven’t talked much about graphics. It’s a very important part of a proposal, and we did talk quite a bit about page and document design. It matters. An evaluator, a reader’s first impression of what they see on the screen, on their monitor, or if they print the proposal out on the page, first impressions matter. We shouldn’t think for a moment that it doesn’t matter what it looks like, what it feels like at a glance. There’s a question, what this is a great question. When are graphics developed using power? Anytime. You know, sometimes when we’re interviewing a technical SME, a subject matter expert or a solution architect, sometimes when we’re planning our section and we’re trying to understand the technical solution, if we can, with them, kind of just sketch something out on a page that can become a master graphic in that proposal section. So, graphics can happen anytime during the power process. Some key graphics ought to be developed early during the planning. And then as we start writing and writing captions and headings and theme statements, graphics can evolve or can be matured and changed. Great question. Thank you for that. So those are the seven characteristics that, you know, part of what Shipley does. We’re lucky in that we were kind of industry agnostic. As has been mentioned earlier, we get to work with a lot of industries, international, domestic, commercial, GovCon, nonprofit, academia. And so, we’re kind of the aggregator. We’re kind of the aggregator of best practice to say, this is what makes a compelling proposal and gives you the best chance of winning almost any industry. It doesn’t matter. This is the foundation that two plus ten divided by two foundational principal order of operation. If we can get our teams to focus on these seven areas, we have a better chance of being more efficient, using our resources better, and hopefully winning more business. Okay. So just a couple of key points here before we dive into each one of those letters in that mnemonic, that word power. The importance of clear writing, I think that’s been well documented today in the sessions. If you didn’t get a chance to participate in the sessions live, please go back. VisibleThread’s going to post these. I encourage you to go back and review those. But we must be clear, crystal clear in our writing. Why must we make content more readable? Because we’re writing for the evaluator. If they can’t read it and if they can’t understand it, forget it. Forget it. We’re not going to score well. It’s all about getting the best evaluation scores, and understanding has to come before an evaluator, a customer is going to be persuaded. If they don’t understand what we’re writing or what we’re showing in a graphic or what we’re showing in a chart, they can’t be persuaded. Understanding must come before persuasion. Readership increases by forty-three to sixty percent when complexity is reduced by three grade levels. If we’re writing at this grade level and most of our evaluators and readers and reviewers are at this grade, we’ve lost them. We’ve lost them. And readership declines. Our evaluation scores decline. This is just kind of a funny, I think, fact that over the years, humanity, we’ve lost the ability to comprehend long sentences. It used to be cool to write long sentences because missus Jones in sixth grade, she wanted a five-hundred-word essay. Or mister Tomlinson, he wanted a one-thousand-word essay. So, we thought long sentences were cool and but clear back to the sixteen hundreds. That’s a little exaggeration probably. But if our words in our sentences are more than twenty words, we ought to probably look at trying to cut that back. This is where tools like VisibleThread can really be very, very helpful. Not just with word count, but with grade levels, we can preset, you know, levels that we want readership to be at. So, some of the technology tools out there are fantastic and paragraphs long loses thirty percent of readership by the end of the fifth paragraph. Think of how you like to read. How do you read now? If and some of you have been or some of you might be on evaluation boards, and you’re being asked to review and score and evaluate proposals. If these paragraphs if they go on and on or our section goes longer than nine paragraphs, we start losing readership. So, we need to be careful. We need to of course; we need to be compliant. We need to be responsive. If it takes fifteen paragraphs to do it, fine. But we’ve got to be really careful and be clear and concise. Few presenters during the day today, it was fantastic, mentioned tone and clarity. Don’t think for a minute that that tone doesn’t come through in our proposals. If we come across arrogant, if we come across like we are the only solution that could possibly solve a customer’s problem that might be perceived as arrogant, stubborn, obnoxious, rude, unreliable. I mean, look at all those words that can be part of the tone of a proposal versus we want to be likable. Yes. We want to be memorable. We heard a presentation on being sticky and stickiness. We want to be memorable, and we want the customer to remember us. So, the Shipley power approach, again, it is just a simple mnemonic, but it helps us, and it helps our teams to remember. We’ve got to spend time upfront planning, strategizing. Who’s our competition? What are our strengths and weaknesses? How are we going to embed those in our proposal? All those sales and capture activities and strategies and win strategies, that’s all part of planning. And the panel before, this session talked about that in a great way. Organizing. Those of you that are working government proposals, they tell us how they want the response organized. So, it’s pretty straightforward. We organize as instructed, period. Those of us that are bidding on more business-to-business work or some r and d, and, we have a little more flexibility in how we organize. In those cases, we focus on what matters to the customer. Those are the items we address first, and then we’ll get into writing, examining, and revising. So, let’s talk about well, let me let me just pause. Let’s see. I’m going to stick some, I’m not sure. Let’s see. I think what we’re saying is short term, quick turn proposal responses. Obviously, we must shorten that that planning process. We’ve got to go with what we have. This is where reuse material comes in handy. This is where, some of the AI platforms might help us generate some quick hit content. But as was stated clearly, we still need the human touch on those. Do you have a cutoff, to prevent burnout? I’m not I’m not sure I understand that question. I’m sorry. I think he’s connecting with kind of a scope creep of a proposal on how to prevent us going far right in terms of how dragging on, how to prevent burnout on a particular proposal that where teams might be stretched too far? Yeah. Yeah. I I’m still not exactly clear how to respond other than it gets back to what was said in the again, I’ll revert to the panel discussion before this, making sure everyone understands their roles and their responsibilities. If we don’t do the planning, some sort of planning upfront, we are going to burn people up. If we skip planning and organizing and we just turn right to writing, maybe that’s what the question is. If we just skip that and go right to writing, it’s going to be a ton of rework, and it is going to burn people out because we’re going to have to instead of two revisions, we’re going to have to do ten revisions. And we’re going to have people jumping into the mix that want to rework everything and wordsmith everything. So maybe that gets to the heart of it is if we ignore that front end planning, we go right into just trying to answer the mail. It creates a ton of rework. Agree. Yeah. We spoke about that earlier in in previous sessions about objective planning and outlining. And even if you’re at this stage kind of identifying and clarifying the process for editing, knowing what exactly your team needs to do to, to get this over the line. Yeah. I don’t know. I’ve seen John’s comment. Yeah. Yeah. And especially in the government space, a lot of times, these due dates slide. You know? They slide to the right. And we need to expect that almost. We need to be prepared for that and plan on that. So, when we talk about proposal planning, we kind of teach it in our training classes. We talk about building contingency plans. Part of the contingency plan for writing a response, a proposal, is what if it does slide to the right? What are we going to do with these resources that we’ve teed up to help with this proposal? We must have alternatives and contingency plans so that, we do avoid the burnout. Great discussion point. Great. Okay. Good. Thank you, John, for chiming in there. Planning, just some key points here. And, again, there’s probably too much here to dwell on in detail. We’ve got to understand the objective of what the customer’s objective is, who the likely audience is, and that’s been boy, that that’s been mentioned in almost every session today. Who is the customer? What do we know about them? Do they have biases? What’s our core message? How are we going to deliver it? Might be a presentation. You know? Some of these government agencies now are going more to oral proposals. And then how do we manage the content. So that’s all part of planning. Notice this little paragraph. Alright? So, here’s a little cutout out from a potential request for proposal, a tender, an RFQ, whatever. Just simple straightforward paragraph. The panel before this session talked about compliance matrix, and so others have mentioned it too. Well, everyone’s going to have a little different opinion. This is where we must start tracking every single section, paragraph of a request for proposal, a tender, an RFI, we must pull out these keywords. They want us to explain why our organization is suited. They want us to describe. They want us to indicate, and then they want us to tell us how we’re going to achieve it, not just what we’re going to do, but tell us how you’re going to achieve the results. We’ve got to be able in our planning of our proposal writing to pull out these key requirements. And if it’s a complex proposal and we have time, we’ve got to build this compliance matrix and make sure we don’t miss any of those. We do describe. We’re going to explain. We’re going to indicate, and we’re going to tell them how we’re going to achieve it. So, planning. Those of you that have been doing proposals for a while and you are familiar with APMP best practice and what Shipley, and others teach, we put a lot of emphasis on theme statements, providing the evaluator roadmaps, key messages that are benefits focused, focused on them and their benefits to help guide their readership, their reading of the proposal. We must keep emphasizing why us and why not our competitors. We need to begin with the customer’s name. This has been stated. We call this customer focus. Name the customer. Name them more often than we name ourselves when we can. Don’t well, this was repeated over and over today. It’s not about us. It’s about solving the customer’s problem and creating value for them. So, what’s the customer going to be able to do to improve on, when, how much, and what why us? What differentiates us from everyone else? So, planning our theme statements is a big part of planning our proposal. Organizing straightforward in most cases. Here’s a simple concept. Right? You see those four boxes down the right side there. Maybe there’s a preview to our section and in a very short introduction, then the body of our response, and then we’re going to review. So, it’s back to what we learned in school. You know? Tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you told them without being repetitive or redundant. So, a few key points here. Organize based on customer needs. Group similar ideas as best you can. Most important ideas first. Use headings and theme statements to guide the reader. These are those fundamentals. Two plus ten divided by two, the order of operations. If we adhere to some of these basic principles, we’ve got a better chance of submitting a winning proposal. Here you see just kind of the top-down organization for the O in power. An opening section, the first section, the next section. Each section has a brief intro, a summary, and a brief conclusion. Here you see how to structure and organize a possible section. Here’s the answer. We talked about one session we had today talked a lot about validating our claims. Putting forward empty claims and statistics that we can’t validate is a bad idea. So, what’s our argument, and what evidence can we provide the customer that we can do the work. So, on this next slide, you see an example. A, b, c will improve effectiveness by twenty-five percent. Here’s what we’re going to do. Here’s how we’re going to do it, and here’s some evidence, some proof. We want those proof points. This is all part of organizing and planning and organizing our proposals and our proposal sections. Okay. Are there any questions lingering? There’s one there, Brad. How to respond to every requirement when sections L, M, and so do not align and you must hit the page limit? Do you focus on section L requirements, or L fold into M or and then fold into South? My response would be, there’s more than one right answer. I’m going to default to the fourth-grade math problem. But the principle, however, is we’ve got to answer it all. And, yes, they may not align. Sometimes, if we’re allowed, we have to provide the customer a response matrix, and we need to tell them where we’ve addressed that piece of information in the SOW in our proposal response or that bit of information in L. But, yes, L is usually the guide. It’s usually the foundation. And then heavily influencing that in the US government proposals would be the M, evaluation criteria, and then, of course, the SOW. So great question. There’s no one right answer and no easy answer. It is so frustrating. I understand. It’s hard when the customer’s solicitation doesn’t align. And they sometimes go so far as ask completely for completely different things in the same solicitation. So great question. Let’s move on to the W, the writing. And we again, please go back to some of these sessions from today. And if you didn’t get a chance to sit in and look at these because a lot of them work about this very thing, writing. How do we make the best use of our time when writing? Start anywhere. You know, sometimes we think we got to start from the beginning, in our writing. No. No. Start anywhere. Go everywhere and just keep going. Think about key messages. This is where that outlining comes into play. An annotated outline is so helpful to our writers if we can create a good outline. Technology can help us, but we’ve got to massage it. We’ve got to make it worthwhile and helpful. Think about graphics early. Think about them later. But what would help us tell the story? What would help the evaluator understand what we’re trying to position? Craft and draft content quickly, resist revising as we go. This is a common challenge. We tend to think everything must be perfect. We’ve got to get that first draft exactly right. It slows us down and makes it more complicated. So just keep on going. There’s been a couple sessions on this, which have been fantastic, and this is just kind of to summarize. When we’re talking about language models and using those, there is certainly a place for it. It can help with efficiency. So, these are some of the pros. Quick, easy, broad access to content generally, helps us brainstorm ideas, gives us access to multisource data, primary and secondary data sometimes. Some of the cautions and con you know, we got to be really careful, and this came up in the session, confidential information. Heaven forbids classified information gets out on these models. What we get might be dated. I will tell you as soon as ChatGPT came out, I went in and I asked for an overview of Shipley Associates, and they thought this guy named Clark Shipley started the company. I don’t even know a Clark Shipley. And so, you know, just be careful because it you know, garbage in, garbage out to some extent. There may be bias in there. We don’t always have the contextual knowledge if we’re depending on artificial intelligence as our source. Some people might use this as an excuse. Well, I didn’t come up with that. Chat GPT did. And now we lose accountability and management. What people can become reckless with it, and there could be just flat-out wrong stuff. You know? Could conflict with reality and truth. So, use it, but be careful. I’m not going to dwell on each one of these points because we’ve this is the end of the day, last session. Customer focus in our writing has been emphasized over and over through these last eight hours today. And these are just some ways, some indicators of how we can make sure our writing, our content is focused on the customer. And you can go through these, validate all claims, organize as instructed, name the customer first. So, these are indicators. Coach your teams on this. You know? We need to share this. We need to educate our teams, whatever their role and responsibility, on what it is to create customer focused proposal content. We are a strong advocate at Shipley in using informative headings in our proposal sections. We could just put revenue as a heading to a topic that’s discussing revenue, or we could tell the customer what is important about what they’re about to read, that that there is a benefit here. Same with employment. We could use employment as a heading, or we could say creating extensive high quality job opportunities for transferred staff. Boy, that’s the benefit. That’s what we’re trying to sell. And then increasing the message impact with graphics and captions. We mentioned that. We won’t this is a whole topic kind of in and of itself. But try to do these early and often. Start with even if it’s a sketch, where can graphics really add value? Select a graphic that really helps the reader understand the evaluator. Sometimes we can use customer graphics if we’ve got the right permissions. Simple, uncluttered. Don’t make the evaluator, like, rotate the screen or rotate the page. You know, keep them vertical. Just, again, some key points on customer focus writing. Break it up. Use headings. Use white space. Make sure we’re using the right font sizes, font types that they’ve instructed, basic information. And then, you know, it sounds kind of old school, but checklists are really helpful. Just having some litmus test to assess our writing and our proposal sections or our volume or the entire proposal or the executive summary, checklists are very, very helpful. And so, technology is helpful. Old school, checklists are helpful. Use what we have at our disposal. And then examine the e in in power. We make this a lowercase e for kind of a goofy reason, I guess. But this is the one area in the writing approach where we’ve got to step outside of ourselves even more. We depend on other people to examine our work. So, we want to set this apart a little bit and say, look. This is where serious, serious collaboration comes in. Yes. It comes in early in the planning and organizing, but we should not be reviewing our own material and examining our own material. So, yes, review it. Call on others. Don’t be afraid to read it out loud. We won’t go into all the different types of reviews. We’re looking for people to help us not criticize, suggest improvements, not just wordsmith. What can a reviewer do to really help us? And there’s really two types of reviews. There’s in an agile, nimble environment, we’re doing daily or regular routine status reviews. Whatever we call them and label them. There’s no reason to wait for a large team review in our proposal work. We should be constantly asking for help and reviewing and doing these stand up milestone reviews. These are key team reviews. Industry often uses color team still, pink team, red team. Whatever we call them, there’s key milestone reviews at certain parts of our development that we need to work on. And then I don’t know if you’ve ever tried this. It’s fascinating. Read your work out loud. You know, when’s the last time you took a five-page section that you had authored, and you took time to read it out loud? Read it out loud to a subordinate. It’s a great idea. It’s a great technique, and it’s sometimes hard. I hate listening to my own voice, but you know what? Don’t be afraid to use this as a technique to help us be more readable, more customer focused. Okay. The final letter, revised, the r in power. The goal here, we’re trying to improve readability. This is where VisibleThread can really come in and be very helpful. Other tools, as well. We’re looking for clarity here. Use the review cycles. This has been mentioned. You know, if you need a way to try and remember what we’re reviewing for, call it the four c’s. You know? We want to be clear. We want to be concise. We want to be correct. We want to be compelling. Don’t make the customer dig for every single answer to every requirement. Clear, concise, correct, and compelling. So, I’ll be clear. In our emails, this is a lost art. I’m telling you. How many emails do you get with a one or two-word subject line? And it’s so stupid. You know? Why not tell the reader what they need to know or do or feel in the subject line? Why do we bury it somewhere in the email? The subject line is there for a reason. It’s to get attention and help the receiver act. Do what you need them to do. So be clear in our subject line, our objectives. Be customer-focused on the content of our proposals. Be concise. Paragraphs, sentences, words, descriptions. Be correct. Proofread everything. Watch our formulas, references, technical data, spelling, grammar, tone. Be compelling. Why us? Why not them? Validate everything. What’s the return on investment to the customer? What’s the value proposition we’re really offering? Now, being correct, that’s I’m just going to scroll through these hats. If you want, you can come back to these, but choosing the right words. We get so jumbled up in our own language sometimes. We use the wrong words, you know, and I’m not exempt from this. It’s just we get going so fast, and spell check won’t catch these things. You know? So, these are just some common redundant words. Watch for redundancies. When we’re in that revised phase, we’re really trying to sharpen our content, look for ways we can get rid of redundancies in our language. Complex words. Don’t make it overly complex. Avoid clichés and jargon. That’s been talked about a lot today, which is fantastic. These are common repeat words that are probably way too frequent in our proposals. Be clear. Say what we mean. So, if the Yes, please. No. Just one point there. And there’s a couple of comments regarding different types of words, use versus utilize and things like that. I’m wondering these types of watchwords and kind of dictionary lists and stuff. Do you have any recommendations for the group around refreshing these dictionaries? We’ve seen customers do things with, like, Joe, if they’d have a series of wins or if they’d have a series of losses that they would do analysis based on those types of Joes, what keywords are they using phenomenally or where they might have not used the brand name in the proposals or not use the customer’s name in the proposals? They would do kind of that type of analysis almost quite regularly to make sure when they go into the next proposal, they’re more set up. I think these types of lists, I think people love these. And I think they really do tangible, but I do think the point of continuously editing and continuously updating them is always going to be beneficial for your org. Yeah. Great point. And thanks for bringing that up because we should be reviewing each proposal to get better. So, if, for example, I was to say this, some of you who have been through our writing training, this will be old hat too. What do you think I’m really trying to say? I don’t have to use words like this. You know? All I’m trying to do is say I used a fork to eat my potato. Let me go back and yes. I come to that bill. You know, just say what we mean and make it easy. There were some questions in earlier sessions about how technical our language should be. And, again, there’s more than one right answer. Sometimes we must write to the lowest common denominator if we know who the evaluation board is. Sometimes we’re writing to a very technical audience, and so this is where customer analysis and understanding the customer really comes into play. So just in summary, and I hope this has been helpful in bringing a lot of what was talked about today together. This mnemonic can help. If you’re in a position where you can coach others or you’re being asked to mentor someone or provide short little training snippets, this becomes a good model for you to teach this concept. Hey. We’ve got a plan. We’ve got to plan this out before we start writing. Now how are we going to organize this section, this proposal, this volume? Here are some writing guidelines. This is how we want to be customer focused. These are theme statements that we want. Here’s an outline. We’re going to annotate this outline. We’re going to give you a page bogey. Now after we get a draft, here’s how we’re going to go about examining those drafts. We’re going to do it regularly, but we’re also going to do team reviews, and then we’re going to revise and make it better. So just a quick, easy way to school our team up and bring our team together and up to speed. So, I’ll pause there and just see if there are any more lingering questions out there. And if not, we’ll call it a night or a day wherever you are. You’re very good, Brad. Brad, thank you so much for that. I think it was a great synopsis of the entire day and bringing some new insights and some tactical pieces as well into the final session. We’ve been asking most of the speakers this consistent question of, if you were to give a writer out there one piece of advice, what would it be? What would be your number one tip? Just it seems simple but focus on the customer. Like others have said, it’s not about how big, bad, fast we are. It’s about what problems are we going to solve and how, and then prove it. Just stay customer focused. Don’t get so caught up in drinking our own Kool-Aid. Simple answers are always the best ones, aren’t they? There it’s always that way. Brad, you’ve been fantastic. I don’t think we have any other questions. Do you have any final parting words for the group? No. No. It’s just been a pleasure, and we’re all trying to get better. If this is your profession, if this is where you’re going forward in your career, take the opportunity like this to learn. APMP offers a ton of good information, good sessions, a body of knowledge, a certification program. So, you know, if this is where you’re landing career-wise, I just encourage everybody to keep learning. Keep learning and keep sharing with one another. That’s all. That’s fantastic. Brad, thank you so much. This is excellent presentation. That was helpful. Like this presentation and all the presentations today will be shared with all the attendees and registrants. Feel free to share them into your networks and with your colleagues. We’re trying to support people out there and give people new knowledge and latest learnings and the easiest formats we can do it. It’s been an outstanding day. We’ve had over a thousand people join us at different times. It’s just been remarkable. So, thank you to all the speakers, and thank you to everybody who turned up today. It’s been an honor to host this event, and we’ll see you next time. Thank you.