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Verbatim text
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Welcome to episode number 134 of the Agency Trailblazer podcast. This is your host Lee. On today’s show, we’re talking with Adam from Better Proposals, and this is a seriously cool episode. Adam is helping us unpack what the hell do we write in a proposal? How should we structure it? How can we save time writing proposals? Because they can take so long. So get your notepad and pen out. This is incredible. Check out the show notes as well. We’ve put some value in there for you as well.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride. This podcast is brought to you by the Agency Trailblazer community. Is agency life stressing you out? Then it is our mission to help you build an agency that you love. We’ve created a community which includes the agency reset roadmap that will allow you to get your agency back on the right track. We also have lots of noble straight to the point, easy to consume workshops. We have a thriving community of other agency owners. And we all wrap up every month with a mastermind call with myself and sometimes a special guest where we unpack your questions. For more details, check out agency trailblazer.com.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Welcome to a conversation with me, mister beautiful Lee Jackson. I’ve been told I’m beautiful by a few people. And mister Adam Hempenstall. I said your name right.
Adam Hempenstall:
You certainly did.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
I got it. I nailed it. Adam Hempenstall from I can’t even say better proposals now. What is going on? I got your name right. But from from better proposals.io. Adam, how are you today?
Adam Hempenstall:
I am very well.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
We could call you Adam Hempey because that’s what you are on Facebook. You can
Adam Hempenstall:
call me Adam Hempey. No one will call me Adam. Yeah. No. Secret to everybody. It’s okay.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Cool. Mister Awesome. I suppose you answer to quite a few names.
Adam Hempenstall:
Many.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Many names and names. Well, Adam, I would love to give you this amazing introduction where I, tell people that you regularly go hand gliding on all of these wonderful things, but I know all of that would probably be lies. So I would love it if you could just introduce yourself, maybe tell us a couple of facts about yourself that nobody knows, and also tell us a little bit about better proposals, and then I’m gonna jump in a time machine with you and just to learn a bit more about your life.
Adam Hempenstall:
Cool. So I haven’t been, hang gliding, but I have been on a paraglider, which was interesting. So yeah. Okay. I have facts about myself. Okay. Well, here’s a here’s a really random one to kick things off, especially for English people. I’ve played at the Amex Stadium, which is Brighton’s home ground before they were in the Premier League.
Adam Hempenstall:
So that was kind of interesting. I my first business Wait.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Wait. Wait. I you were a goalkeeper for that, were you?
Adam Hempenstall:
Yeah. It was a charity thing that we did. Yeah. And you could rent the stadium out. So, like, 30 of us got together. And we yeah. I think it worked out, like, a 100 quid each. We were like, hang on.
Adam Hempenstall:
You get to play at the Amex for a 100 quid. So we’ve got the tour, we’ve got, like, the changing room thing, we’ve got this dinner, and then we’ve got to play like a full floodlit recorded game. It’s amazing. Wow. Yeah. So I played in golf 70 minutes at the Amex Stadium.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Amazing. And then you’re gonna tell us something else. Sorry. I Yeah.
Adam Hempenstall:
I I just thought of just, thinking of random facts. I never really came prepared for this. But, yes, my first business was selling wrestling tapes with wrestling theme songs when I was 13 years old.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
That is seriously random.
Adam Hempenstall:
Yeah. Yeah.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
I mean, most people like yeah. I had a tuck shop. I used to sell sweets in the school. That’s every entrepreneur’s. You’re, like, selling wrestling stuff. Yeah. It
Adam Hempenstall:
was pretty awesome. It was it was super popular at school. My dad got the Internet. And Yeah. I would I mean, we had, like, a it was like a first ever like 14 4 modem or whatever. So I would spend a week downloading the rock screenshot and then Bing. Bing. That’s it.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah. Yeah. I remember. It
Adam Hempenstall:
never gets old. And I would I would play it out of my computer speakers. These really bad speakers and I’d use a microphone with my tape recorder and I would literally mic up the speaker and that’s how I would record onto tape. And then I would get the whole tape set up playing one track after the other And everyone in the house would be silent. And then I would copy from one tape to the other, and that was my production line.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
That is intense. Yeah. That’s actually quite genius if if I’m honest. I’m impressed. But, of course, now we’re quite illegal. Yeah. And so maybe we should edit all of this out and pretend your name’s Ralph.
Adam Hempenstall:
Ralph? That’s not even my last name.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
So that so that you can’t be, sued by, anyone who’s remotely related to nineties wrestling mania
Adam Hempenstall:
or whatever it was. Fine with that. I’m sure that
Lee Matthew Jackson:
I may have just aged you. Was it in the nineties? I’m presuming it was. Or the early 2000, surely.
Adam Hempenstall:
I it might have been crossing over, actually. So, yeah, it would have been super early 2000 for sure. But yeah.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Just just quick one. I remember free serve as well when that came out because I I once ran up a £400 in 1 month phone bill using the Internet via our phone.
Adam Hempenstall:
Really?
Lee Matthew Jackson:
And my dad dad nearly killed me. And, I’m still alive. So, you know, good good good ending to the story. But, I think I paid back the bill as well at some point. But, we we then moved to free serve, and that was amazing because it was something like £30 a month or something. And you dial That’s it. A 800 free number. And I just remember, like, that that to me was that was when it all started.
Adam Hempenstall:
That was amazing.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
My my love of the Internet. Yeah. And that obviously removed the fear of being killed by my parents. So but now we’ve got, like, a 100 meg down and a 100 meg up, and that’s even slow because if you talk to some of the people in Europe and some of the people who use Google Internet, they’re, like, on a a terabyte or something ridiculous download speed now. It’s just it’s not fair.
Adam Hempenstall:
That’s, anyway Yeah. That is hardly unfair. Sorry. Yes. This is this is the most, tangent orientated introduction of all time.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
I know. And that’s what we do here on the Agency Trailblazer Podcast. We talk crap for at least the first 5 minutes just to, you know, ease people in so they can get to know you. So, already, people are relating with you. They recognize that you’re probably not as young as you look on all those pictures that you’ve heavily photoshopped. Because you can remember the early 2000.
Adam Hempenstall:
I can’t remember GEDS. Thought you well.
Speaker C:
Well, exactly. And so can I? And we’ll say no more. Now then,
Lee Matthew Jackson:
I’m interested in finding out how you got started with Better Proposals, but which is the business that you’re running. But can we just find out a little bit more about how you got into the web industry in general first before we get into that?
Adam Hempenstall:
Yeah. So I my dad got the internet really, really, really early and because of that when people started understanding what it actually was, I ended up, being like the computer guy when I was a kid. So, I started doing like, my brother and my cousin were both in bands and I did their websites for them. And they because there was less websites on the Internet, people actually hung out on these little message boards that we would create and they’d actually talk. It was really quite interesting. Sort of what Facebook groups are now, I guess. But good old message boards back in the day. And so I would end up doing websites for all of these little, little bands that my brother would play with.
Adam Hempenstall:
And I would end up doing the websites for all of their parents’ businesses, be it electrician or, you know, guy that’s like a plumber or whatever. So just like trades and stuff. And then it just kind of I don’t wanna say just like took off. I ended up just doing websites for people and that was that was that. And that just kept me going for the years really. And then I just decided to I was sort of doing college I think alongside that at some point. And then this is how far back it goes. I can’t even remember.
Adam Hempenstall:
It’s like 15 years of just blur. But, yeah, at some point, I think I was doing like a call center job and then I was there for 6 months or something and then they laid us off and actually gave us quite a lot of money relative to how long we’ve been there and how many hours that actually worked. And I thought, actually, do you know what? I’m gonna give this thing a go. I’d finished college and everything else and thought, actually, I’m just gonna, like, see what happens. The worst case scenario, I can always go and get another job, but I’ve got enough money to keep going till the end of the year. I’ll just keep seeing if I can do this. So I did and put our prices up a little bit. And, yeah, just basically did that.
Adam Hempenstall:
And then sort of pretty much just kept edging the pricing up. Edging up the quality of the clients, edging up the skill set, getting, you know, other freelancers in to do other little bits. Basically, just hacking our way through the whole thing. It’s like 0 plan whatsoever. Like, every time we got a new client, the whole thing, like, the whole operation would start from scratch. The whole thing.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah.
Adam Hempenstall:
So it was just constantly making up as we went along. And that was, I think, probably the best bit about it. You got to start a new business almost every time you got a new client. It was quite good fun.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah.
Adam Hempenstall:
Yeah. And then that just, when I sort of grew up a little bit, I guess, that sort of kind of turned into, I suppose, what you’d call a proper agency.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah. Also, probably a proper nightmare as well if you’re doing that whole thing over and over and over again. Because I I can remember for myself without any processes and kind of starting everything over again, it actually became quite tiresome. It was really enjoyable at first and exciting. And I don’t know if you can kind of resonate here with me. But that’s the problem I started to have was we were upping the the caliber of the client and the size of the projects and, obviously, the size of the invoices, which was very exciting and nice. But I was just getting so tired,
Adam Hempenstall:
with what the project was. Resonate. Completely resonate. And it’s it does get really, really tiring. And, you know, that that’s part of you know, in this day and age, I don’t think people do it quite as much because there’s a lot more, information out there. I mean, obviously, people like yourself and there’s obviously WP elevation and there’s all sorts of courses and things like that out there these days that can kind of hopefully get people shortcut that first bit a little bit. So you haven’t got to sort of struggle for 7 years through this constant learning thing. You can sort of trim that down a little bit to a couple maybe.
Adam Hempenstall:
But, but no. So I did that and and then, you know, just to kind of struggled our way through. Finally, kind of grew up and actually sort of set the thing up as a proper business and everything else. And it was, like, a really weird transition where we started getting lots and lots and lots of compliments on the this is pre WordPress, by the way. So, like, the the back end of the system. So what would be WordPress now? We built all that from scratch every time. Efficient, I know.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah. Very, very efficient.
Adam Hempenstall:
Yeah. So we we did all that from scratch every single time. So, people would give us loads of compliments on how good and easy to use the back end side of things. But the front end, the actual website that we were selling them never really got rave reviews. So it was kind of interesting because we’re like, well, we’re obviously not a very good web design company then, are we? Because the bit that’s supposed to be kind of almost like an added extra, just a bit of a bonus, it ended up getting better response than the rest of it. So we just started slowly switching into this idea of being sort of like a bit of a halfway house between a web design agency and a software company. And Mhmm. It was quite difficult actually in that sort of middle bit where we didn’t really know what the hell we were.
Adam Hempenstall:
Then eventually we switched and actually just went full tilt into this whole idea that we were gonna automate businesses. And then I wrote a book called Automate Your Business, And that really helped because it made things easy for people to understand.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah.
Adam Hempenstall:
So I wrote that in 2010, 2011. And that really worked as an as a really good lead generator because it was an actual physical book. So people would request it online. And then I would actually send it to them next day and that literally blew people’s minds. They’d fill it in at 3:30, 4 o’clock in the afternoon and it’d literally be on their doorstep the following morning. So it was, that was really, really, really cool and it’s it helped us stand out. And then we built, I don’t know, a fairly decent sized software company.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s very Ryan Dice of you, by the way.
Adam Hempenstall:
Was that the,
Lee Matthew Jackson:
getting having a physical book on the doorstep within within 24 hours. He’s totally done that on me.
Adam Hempenstall:
It’s a it’s a really good way of doing it. And it the the one thing we found was that it just got so much attention. Like, what does it say? How serious is it? Like, could you fill stuff in all the time and you forget all about it then? If somebody said to you, what are all the things you signed up for filled in or put your name and email into yesterday? You probably couldn’t even you forget the second you’ve done it. So this was a really good way of putting that marker down and go, no, we’re serious. Like, you requested this book. Here it actually is. You better read it. And, then we’d follow-up with them and, you know, so for every 50 books we we sent out, which cost about 4 quid, we did £15,000 worth of software sales.
Adam Hempenstall:
That was what we got it.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s amazing. So it worked. So for every £4, you were you’re generating 15 k of business. Right. That’s right. Right. Every every
Adam Hempenstall:
each book was 4 quid. Each book was 4 quid to send to them, and then we’d need to send 50 of them to win 15 thousand. So that’s what you said.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Right. That’s still just that’s still the bargain.
Adam Hempenstall:
Yeah. The maths was still working quite nicely. So
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah. Although I was more impressed at the £4 and completely misunderstood you, but that’s totally fine. That so we’re talking about 200 cost. That’s amazing.
Adam Hempenstall:
Plus an ad spend. But yeah. Even even then it was still very marginal. It was crazy good profit margin. So that was when we started getting quite smart and actually started trying to automate some of this stuff. And that that kind of got us to a point where we were in quite a lot of companies, you know, from a from a service business level, you know, going in automating different parts of their business. So sort of their lead gen, their marketing, their sort of selling, their invoicing, all of that kind of stuff is all connected. And we were going to build custom systems that connected the whole lot together.
Adam Hempenstall:
So it wasn’t any of this, like, hook up Zapier stuff. This literally was all built from scratch. So we would go in and do that. Sounds really cheap now, I think about it. But, yes, we would go and do that. And then, again, we would find that we would spend a load of time and effort doing these proposals and get radio silence when we sent them. Sometimes. Yeah.
Adam Hempenstall:
So I was like, this is driving me out the warm spending absolutely ages on these things. So I said to my cofounder, Sabrina, and her Sabrina, and her development team, like, can one of you just please make something that’s just web based where I can actually just see when they opened it? Just a notification would be great. So one of the guys goes away, hacks away at this thing. So here you go. Let’s check this out. So he’s made this viewer, which is literally pretty much what you see as Better Proposals now. Obviously, a super early version of it. And it was amazing because we actually found out when they opened it.
Adam Hempenstall:
He even built in the tracking so we could see what they looked at and when. Oh, this is amazing. They’ve opened it straight up. They’ve looked at the price. They’ve closed it down. Awesome. Yeah. I know exactly what kind of person this is now.
Adam Hempenstall:
They’re a price shopper. So that was the that was the kind of light bulb moment. And then that kind of just rumbled on for a little bit where people would say, oh, that’s really cool. Like, yeah, I’ll go for it. I’ll have your what you quoted me or whatever. But by the way, that thing you sent me the proposal on, that would work really well in our business. Can we have that as well? So then that started to happen. And then eventually, one weekend, it was actually Sabrina that suggested it.
Adam Hempenstall:
She was like, can you just stop selling the CRM thing? It’s a real pain in the ass for us. Can you just can we just sell Better Proposals because it’s much easier? Didn’t call that at that point but so we just bought this domain name betterproposals. Io, bought a couple of ads on Twitter, follow I can’t even remember what we did now with it and we had more sign ups for a non existent free trial of that product in 24 hours than we had in the previous year for the other business. We were like
Lee Matthew Jackson:
What do you mean a non existent free trial? Well, we
Adam Hempenstall:
didn’t have the product wasn’t it wasn’t a standalone product. We just set up a landing page saying try now and then people filled the form in. Try now. And that was it. Yeah. So we just we didn’t even have
Lee Matthew Jackson:
the So this was your validation before you did anything with it. Okay. That’s a phenomenal story. Yeah. Well, so you you’ve literally just fast forwarded from, you know I’ve
Adam Hempenstall:
just got through the whole thing. Have a nice No.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s amazing. No. It’s fine. The the so but what you’re saying is is for 7 years’ worth of, you know, making plenty of mistakes, restarting things, kinda getting a bit tired at times, to eventually starting to build processes. You then built some software to help you guys out because you found proposals were really stressful. To suddenly you’ve got a product that actually is gonna serve a a serve them you know, serve a niche or serve other people that you can start to sell. Does that therefore mean that this has become your primary source of income, or are you still
Adam Hempenstall:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Really?
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Building sites and doing this. So you are now full time better proposals?
Adam Hempenstall:
Yeah. We have been for nearly 3 years now. So we, we closed everything else down a long, long, long time ago. The agency, we just closed down. We didn’t even sell it. We didn’t do anything. We just closed it down. We just stopped doing it.
Adam Hempenstall:
Completely fell out of love with it. Yeah. But I think it was more because we’re moving on. So it wasn’t like we fell out of love with it in that moment. We just, oh, I’ve had enough of it. It was that we’d moved on to sort of, to us, more exciting things. And then because of that, it was the old thing, you know. So we closed that down and then eventually did the same thing with the with the software company.
Adam Hempenstall:
So yeah. So but yeah. Just under 3 3 years now. Got a full time team of 6 and yeah. But same again in sort of part time stroke contract. So, yeah, it’s gone nicely.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s incredible. So had a problem, created a solution for the problem. Your clients loved it, and they wanted to be a piece of that, and you decided to productize. 3 years later, you are running a full time company. Guys, if you wanna see some more information on better proposals, you can check that out over on anglecrown.comforward/betterproposals. That’s anglecrown.comforward/betterproposals to go and check that out. We also have an account. And I’ve actually got some questions for you on proposals, which is kinda why I got you on the show.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
And the first thing is is proposals feel like they have to take so freaking long. I have a conversation with a client, and they tell me all the sorts of things that they want. And then I feel I have to somehow regurgitate all of this into a proposal. And it can take absolutely hours to do that. I mean, obviously, we start to do things like paid discoveries now to mitigate all of that sort of stuff so that we’re not giving people tons of free consultancy. But there can be times that for a lot of businesses that proposals will take maybe 3 to 5 hours to put together just to send to someone. And when you’re doing, say, 10 to 20 proposals in a month, and you’re maybe only converting 2 or 3 of those, that’s a lot of work. So what advice would you have just kind of to to kick us off with was, you know, how can we speed up the proposal?
Adam Hempenstall:
Yeah. Well, the first thing is the the reason that it takes so long most of the time is because you think that that particular client is special. And the second you realize that they’re just another potential client and if you want to be realistic about it, they probably won’t buy. Then it changes the outlook a little bit. So yes, of course, you want to put a lot of effort in and you you obviously want to treat each client differently and what have you. But you you kind of can’t. And it depends what you’re selling. I mean, if you’re selling, you know, 200, £300,000, you know, items or software or solutions or whatever, then, yeah, by all means spend 5 hours on it.
Adam Hempenstall:
It probably deserves it. But, you know, even if you’re not gonna get it, it’s it’s worth the risk. It’s worth the time. But if you’re selling if you’re selling websites for, you know, 2 to $10, then it’s probably it probably doesn’t deserve 5 hours of your time for a start. So but in terms of like practical how to speed it up, the first thing you have to do is is know in your own mind it isn’t going to take that long because that’s the bit that actually slows you down. It’s not really the actual writing of it. If you think about it, it’s really not. It’s the actual fact that you spend 2 days thinking about the fact that you’ve got to write it.
Adam Hempenstall:
That’s the bit that’s the bit that murders you because it sucks everything else away because you can’t that’s
Lee Matthew Jackson:
all procrastination, isn’t it? You’re not actually doing it. You know you’ve got to.
Adam Hempenstall:
Yeah. And that’s the part that sucks about it is because you’re you’re you’re trying to you know you’ve got to do it. You know you’ll have to do it. You can’t get out of it. But every single task from unloading the dishwasher to putting your kid to bed to doing some kind work that’s actually paid all makes you feel guilty. Every single one of them. And, you know, it that those tasks make you feel guilty when you’ve got a proposal to write because you know that that’s new business. So here’s a couple of things.
Adam Hempenstall:
The first thing is if you go and physically meet your client and you get them to meet you somewhere cool or you go to their office or whatever, the first thing I would do is I would say, you know, get them to meet you somewhere and get them to meet you somewhere really cool. So I always used to, work for a software company and our agency. I would always get them to meet me in a really, really, really smart hotel even if it was close to them. So I would do the traveling happily, but I would make them get up and get out of their office or get out of their workplace and come and meet me in, you know, either a Hilton or somewhere that’s nice in that market because Yeah. What happens when you walk into somewhere nice is you play the persona of somebody that’s also doing that. So if they’re not necessarily used to that and don’t hang out in those places very often, often, and it works if they do as well, but if they don’t, it makes them stand taller, it makes them more confident, it makes them make big decisions and that’s exactly the state you want them in. So when you sit down with them, they’re already in a state where they feel good about themselves And if you tell them that you’re going to such and such a place, they will dress the part. And all of that sounds airy fairy and nonsensical and also sounds nothing to do with proposals but bear with me.
Adam Hempenstall:
But it puts them in a really, really good excitable, happy, powerful state. And that’s the kind of state you actually want the kind of the person that’s about to potentially write you some, you know, send you some money. That’s the state you want them in. So you have your meeting, you do your discovery, and I’ll leave that to people that are far more qualified to talk about it than me. But once you’ve had the meeting and you’ve said your goodbyes and everything else, stay there, stay there, and do the proposal there and then because that’s when it’s all fresh in your mind. So when you’ve been discussing all these different things and you, you know, they’ve used certain phrases, they use they’ve used certain words, that’s the stuff that makes them feel like when they’re reading it back that you’ve understood them. It’s it’s that stuff that really makes the difference. So all I would say is when they’re talking write down exactly the words and phrases that they’re using at key points.
Adam Hempenstall:
So if they’re describing something or they’re describing a problem or they’re saying, you know, how they’re fearful of something or, you know, whatever it is, write those things down and then put that into the proposal. So Can I just back that
Lee Matthew Jackson:
up a second?
Adam Hempenstall:
Yes.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah. I’m so literally just a few days ago, we’ve been doing this now for the last couple of years with regards to writing stuff down the minute we finish that meeting. And just the other day, I was able to write down an entire reverse brief, which was at least 2 pages long in a Google document. And it just all poured out of my brain because I’d just done that meeting. It was just a conference call, and we spent a whole hour talking. I wrote a few bullet points of the structure so I knew what my structure was, and then I was just able to regurgitate pretty much everything they’d said to me because it was all so freaking fresh. And that was sent to them within 30 minutes of the initial call, and that blew their mind. That that didn’t even go with a proposal.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
That was just, hey, I want you to know these are my notes. This what I’ve understood about call. Can you correct anything that’s wrong? And that already, blows people’s minds, and it also saves you a load of freaking time. Sorry. Carry on, mate.
Adam Hempenstall:
That’s alright. I was just gonna say, and if you had to do that 2 days later, any guesses as to how much longer it might have taken you, and I
Lee Matthew Jackson:
would Particularly all freaking afternoon.
Adam Hempenstall:
Yeah. And and also, how how bad English, but, like, how less accurate would it have been?
Lee Matthew Jackson:
It would have been awful. I would have yeah. Exactly. I would have forgotten so much.
Adam Hempenstall:
It’s the little things. It’s the little things. It’s the words and phrases that they use and then they read that back and they’re like, oh, that’s actually what I said. That’s actually how how I’m thinking. Because you took the words and phrases out of their brain because they gave them to you and then you gave them back. So it’s just it creates this really nice chemistry, you know, and you know when you meet someone you just get on with them, you finish each other’s sentences all that kind of stuff and you feel good about the interaction. That’s what you’re creating with this and some of the reason why proposals are so difficult is, you know, you’re talking different languages. You’re talking tech, they’re talking I’m scared and I’ve got a problem and I need it fixed.
Adam Hempenstall:
You both talk in different languages, so if it’s not about meeting in the middle, it’s about you going to them. You got you need to go and talk their language. This proposal is not for you. You don’t need it doesn’t need to be written in technical setup. It just in jargon and stuff. It needs to be in their language. So as a practical, how to speed this up, first of all, get rid of the procrastination. Staying after the meeting, be it in the hotel, be it wherever it is, is a really, really good one because it shortens down the time that you can forget stuff and it makes you do it there and then.
Adam Hempenstall:
So if the meeting is gonna be an hour, schedule 2 hours out the office and just stay there for another hour and commit to it. That’s the first thing. The second thing is knowing what you need to actually write. So this is where it comes down to having a good proposal system, cheap plug, and also having a good template set up. Having a good template set up where you know the bits that you’re going to edit. So let’s go through the things you might want to edit. The introduction and the executive summary or the snapshot, whatever you want to call it, is the most important part of the proposal. Almost nothing else really matters that much.
Adam Hempenstall:
It’s really just that bit. So if you nail that, then everything else flows perfectly. You don’t need to worry too much. So that’s the first thing. If you just get that bit done, then, you know, everything everything else flows. The second thing is making sure that you have got the depending on how you do your proposals, but if you’re actually sort of writing out any sort of specification or like, the what we’re gonna do part, services, whatever it is, there’s that part which should be, if you’re selling the same stuff every time, pretty similar to the last one you did. So you can if you use something like Better Proposals or any of our nasty competitors, they’re not nasty but whatever, then most of these things have built in content libraries into them. So you can save certain chunks of of text and things like that and you can reuse them.
Adam Hempenstall:
So use these kinds of features in proposal software because it, you know, it just saves you so much time. So there’s that whole concept of just writing out exactly what you’re gonna do for them. That’s probably gonna take you the longest generally, but if you can systemize that a little bit, you sell the same stuff week in week out, it should just be a little bit of a, you know, a tart up, add the little specifics and off you go. The third thing is, a case study. Now I’d always recommend including case studies. It’s crazy how many people don’t, especially including relevant case studies. So if you’re gonna go and see somebody that wants to increase the number of leads that they generate for their business including a case study where you actually did that for somebody else probably would go down quite nicely. Be a good little story to include.
Adam Hempenstall:
So that’s always worth doing and if you don’t have full case studies then at least include something that illustrates that you’ve done this kind of thing before because you know, we’ve whether it’s testimonials, whether it’s, you know, screenshots is probably the of of previous work is probably the worst thing to include. Of the 3, testimonials are better, case studies are even better than that. So whatever you can do
Lee Matthew Jackson:
What what we did, how we did it, what the results were, that sort of thing.
Adam Hempenstall:
Exactly. Simple stuff. It doesn’t need to be that complicated. It’s exactly as you said. It’s, you know, what was the problem? What was the proposed solution? What did you do? And what was the result? And preferably a backing up of a testimonial that says, you know, validates what you’ve said. And the last thing is the price and that’s and that’s it. So when you know that you’ve got the price to do, which you probably already worked out in your head anyway, it takes 2 seconds to type that in. Your case study should be a case of just selecting it from something you’ve already written.
Adam Hempenstall:
You know, you’ve got your specification or your what we’re gonna do part, which should be simply editing something you’ve already written. And then you’ve got your snapshot or your executive summary or introduction, which is really the only fresh bits being written. So Mhmm. When you know that that’s all you gotta do, this doesn’t seem like such a daunting task. Funny, I hadn’t taken so long to tell that story.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
No. It’s a great story. I I really enjoyed it. And it does parallel with a a lot of people in agency life. We will go to a meeting, we’ll think, right, I’ll remember that, and then we’ll go and jump in the car and drive all the way home. And then 3 days later, we’ve eventually coming around to actually writing the proposal, and we’ve forgotten most of the stuff that we say we were, you know, talked about, which then puts us under tons of pressure because we’re trying to write something that sounds like we, you know, remembered what they want, but we’re also now worried that maybe we’re not pricing it right because we can’t remember all of the information. And we’ve maybe sent different proposals in the past that have all been written in different ways. This is this is us 2 years ago.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
You know, every single proposal was always completely different. There was no actual commonality. So it was a case of trying to get go into our email, into Gmail, and finding old proposals that we’d sent to try and copy and paste stuff from that that wasn’t really relevant because we, you know, wrote that in a rush as well. And before before, you know, you’ve spent an entire day in a Word document, and then you end up sending it to a designer to make it look really pretty because you think, you know what? I’ve really butchered this. Looks terrible. This proposal is awful. Maybe if a designer makes it look pretty, they won’t realize how terrible this proposal is. And that was pretty much rinse and repeat what we were doing.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
And I’m pretty sure, if people are honest, perhaps they’ve also been doing that because not because we’re lazy, but because we’re all very busy all the time. And sometimes it’s we don’t realize that, or we kind of self sabotage without meaning to by not doing some of these really easy things, those things that you’ve described, that will really, really help us because, it’s very tempting as an agency owner to just respond and, kind of firefight to the next nearest issue that’s happening. That could be looking after the cash flow by jumping onto something else, because there’s a client who’s waving some money at you, or it could be there’s the client’s got a problem, or whatever it is. There’s loads of other things that just seem kind of all super important that draw you away post that initial meeting. And it’s certainly something that we’ve learned over the last couple of years, especially is just making sure that and we do it with the podcast as well. After this podcast, I’m going to outro because I’ll remember everything that we’ve said. If I save it until several days later, I end up having to listen back to the entire show to create the notes, to create the intro. You know, it’s ridiculous.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
And that’s exactly how we did the podcast for, like, a 100 episodes. So this is episode number 34 or 35. I’m not sure which one it’s gonna be yet, but I will have already have written 2 or 3 weeks before it goes live the intro and recorded all of the you know, recorded all of that because I’m going to do it the minute you hang up because it’s fresh and it’s relevant, and I’ll still have all of that energy as well. So I know it’s got nothing to do necessarily with proposals, but it’s that same sort of thing, you know, doing
Adam Hempenstall:
It’s the same exact point.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
And having a process as well.
Adam Hempenstall:
Yeah. And then this is this is exactly the point. It doesn’t matter that it takes 5 hours. 5 hours is fine if it’s if it deserves it, of course. It’s the fact that it it just makes it better and there’s there’s a whole number of other reasons why you might want to do it. So I mean, I don’t know about you, but when I sent proposals to potential clients, I wanted to get them to approve it, which is obviously the most important thing. And if they were gonna approve approve it, I wanted them to do it as quick as they possibly could.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
And pay that deposit. Damn it. And pay
Adam Hempenstall:
the damn deposit. Yeah. Exactly. That that’s literally the the most important thing is just get that deposit in. And like exactly as you say, you know, as an agency owner, you’re often spending your entire life firefighting, be it fixing, you know, a bug or something small, it could be, you know, some sales y related stuff, whatever it is, it’s that’s the bit that’s, that’s frustrating, right? So, I can’t remember when we did this but earlier in the year we gathered a load of data from our customers and aggregated all of this together to basically ask ourselves the question, statistically, what makes the best proposal? What makes a proposal that’s gonna convert the best? So we’ve compiled all of this into a report. You can have a look at the report. You can stick in the show notes, but it’s just better proposals dot I 4/report. So you can go and have a look at all of this information.
Adam Hempenstall:
But one of the things in there was what the effect was on sending the proposal quickly. Now what we did was we looked at proposals that were created and sent using Better Proposals within 24 hours and this is what we found. So if a proposal was sent within 24 hours, the conversion rate was 25.9% better than if it was sent just after 3 to 4 days. So if you leave your proposal 3 days versus sending it within 24 hours, it was 25% better chance it was going to get converted. Massive number.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s mind that’s mind blowing.
Adam Hempenstall:
Yeah. It’s real numbers. We didn’t we didn’t go into this with any agenda at all. We literally just combed out the numbers and just went, how did they appear? And that was it. So this is this is all real numbers. And the other thing was time to sign. So this actually makes quite a lot of sense. The other one does as well.
Adam Hempenstall:
But if so when you send the proposal, the average time to sign, if you sent it, within 3 to 4 days was 9 days 14 hours. If you sent it within 2 to 3 days, it was very similar. 1 to 2 days, it was again very similar. Sent within 24 hours, it’s 6 days. So it’s 4 days quicker if you send it within 24 hours. So some of this stuff is just you’re saying, right. Okay. So if I basically schedule my meetings in a hotel and then I stay there for an hour afterwards and then write the proposal, not only am I potentially increasing my turnover of my business by 25%, but also I’m gonna get paid or get the deals pushed through 4 days quicker on average.
Adam Hempenstall:
Possibly worth just hanging out after the meeting and writing the proposal.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s that’s 4 days from actually sending the proposal as well. Correct.
Adam Hempenstall:
Yeah.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
So you’re sending it sooner and you’re actually getting a quicker time to sign as it were.
Adam Hempenstall:
Yeah. And and also a lot of these I mean, most of our customers these days have the, Stripe, PayPal, or GoCardless integration set up on their proposals. So when people pay or sorry, sign the proposal and say, yes, I agree to that, whatever, they’re then presented with a screen that says, great. Thanks for signing. Now you pay your deposit. So immediately, they are asked to pay the deposit and then they obviously, you know, you get the money whenever whenever those individual services pay you out. But the point is you get the damn thing pushed through the door quicker and if you’re quick, they’re quick. That’s generally the the kind of vibe here.
Adam Hempenstall:
And if you think about all of those bigger deals that you win I mean, I don’t know if this is true for everybody, but I always found that the ones where every it was all crazy, and everybody’s like, right. This is super important to us, and we need to get this thing done now. And you’re, like, okay. We’ll get the proposal done in, like, 24 hours. They’re, like, okay. Cool. Can you actually get it done to us today? Because we’re ready to go, and it’s Friday. You’re, like, do you know what? Yeah.
Adam Hempenstall:
Sweet. So everything else just goes out the window. You smash out the proposal. Everybody’s it’s all hands on deck. You get the proposal to them, you had the call 2 hours later, you smash out a few details, off you go. Boom. Done. And that happened so many times and I think the reason why is because it was that idea of just getting it to them quickly and then it was all fresh and they could make the decision rather than letting it let them sleep on it.
Adam Hempenstall:
Then another weekend, then Monday rolls around. Now it’s the middle of the week, and it’s actually when you get work done. Before you know it, it’s week and a half, and you’ve got chase, chase, chase. You know, your positioning and your, like, credibility goes down because you’re chasing it, like, you know, it’s just pathetic, isn’t it? Hey. Did you get the proposal? When can we talk about it? Oh, okay. You’re busy now. Alright. You know what I mean? It’s all rubbish.
Adam Hempenstall:
And if you can avoid all of that by just getting it to them quickly, it just makes you look so much better across the board, not to mention the results.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
But, also, I mean, I’m just thinking now as somebody who sometimes is the receiver of proposals that maybe take time, I also talk myself out of stuff the longer it takes. So if I receive something instantly and I look at it and I’m compelled by it because, like you said, it’s I’ve had certain things I’ve said repeated back to me. I’ve I’ve got this connection. This person really understands what I’m doing. I’m much more likely to respond there then and go ahead and do it. That’s not to say sometimes I then don’t sometimes crap myself thinking, oh, did I make the right decision? I’ve just spent a whole load of money, and I’m not sure I should have done that. But, anyway, you know, I think we’ve all done that. But, I am more likely to talk myself out of investing in something that is actually really worthwhile if the person I have asked to provide me some proposals starts taking their own sweet time about things.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Because, you know, if I’ve asked you to come and visit me, and and I want you to do some work with me, and then it takes you a long time, it’s it’s not great, really, is it? I I Mhmm. I’m an action person. I want to make decisions. I want to start. I want to know what my next step is already. I don’t really want have to hang out, keep checking my emails, and send you a chaser email. So it’s not cool. Now, there is one thing I’m really interested in because Mhmm.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Even though we write proposals now, we’ve got them very we’re very quick with our proposals now because of, of using what you do, really, which is we write them pretty much the minute we’ve done our meeting. We write the big intro. I’ve already worked out the price during the call on a notepad, so I already know what the breakdown is gonna be. And it could be even a ballpark. That is fine in a proposal because sometimes people do need you to, obviously, do some sort of investigation. And that’s like an architect’s plan, which you get paid for, and then you can give them build cost like you would with a house. Mhmm. But one of the things that we still struggle with, I’ll be completely honest, is not sending freaking boring proposals with tons and tons of text that they’re not gonna read.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
So have you got any advice for making a proposal more consumable, therefore, more likely to convert?
Adam Hempenstall:
Okay. So there’s a couple of things. The first thing is what, the audience listening to this generally sells is something that is a technical thing. So it’s quite easy for us as techie people to write down information about the techie thing. The problem is the person that’s reading this does not understand what any of that stuff actually is. So what ends up happening is you write a nice description of what WordPress is. They don’t care what WordPress is. They care about the fact that the information on their website is incorrect and they’re getting loads of phone calls because the phone number’s wrong.
Adam Hempenstall:
And they’ve, like I I don’t know. Like, they they get no phone calls because the phone number’s wrong or they get loads of phone calls asking them what time they’re open or whatever. And there’s there’s so many little examples as to why you wouldn’t tell somebody about the technical stuff. It’s just it’s especially if you’re selling, you know, if you’re doing agency stuff, you have a technical skill that they don’t have. So, by almost definition, they don’t understand it. So, keeping jargon out of the proposal is probably the simplest thing you can do to make it more readable. That’s the simplest thing you can do. The second thing you can do, if you want to include or you need to include either some sort of technical jargon, is the which means that trick.
Adam Hempenstall:
So all you do is you have something that’s, you know, something that’s technical or an algorithm or whatever acronyms, right, and or whatever it is you’re you’re gonna include and then you simply add which means that afterwards and then answer the question. So we use WordPress because it’s open source, which means that you will never have a problem with anyone being able to edit your website. That is the key point. It’s it’s basically getting benefits out of features and you need to do that across the across the board. So if you wanna make your proposal more readable, talk in their language, don’t talk in your own language because this is not for you.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
It’s not an internal document.
Adam Hempenstall:
It’s a document. It’s a document for some person that’s out there that does not have your experience. So you just talk in their language. So that’s from a readability perspective, that’s important. We covered earlier using their language and their actual words and phrases they’ve used in the meeting. That’s obviously applies here. Now in terms of other things you can do, the first thing well, I suppose the third thing at this point would be don’t send something that looks like everything else. So part of the reason why people that use better proposals end up doing quite so well is because even if they’re sending the same, you know, crappy, boring, techy, abused document that they were sending before, it’s at least copied into an interesting and unique format.
Adam Hempenstall:
So if you if you’ve ever looked at Better Proposals, you’ll know that our the format of our proposals is quite different. You know, nice, sort of, big, full screen covers that take up the whole browser window. It’s obviously in a browser, so it doesn’t look like a document, a PDF.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
It’s like a microsite,
Adam Hempenstall:
that Yeah.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
It’s like
Adam Hempenstall:
it’s like a little it’s like a little microsite. Yeah. It’s a it’s a it’s a personalized experience for the person you’re sending a proposal to. So treat it like that. Treat it with the kind of, I guess, respect it deserves in that way. So, you know, make it about them. It’s about them. It’s not about you.
Adam Hempenstall:
So try to try to get your stuff out of it and just talk to their problem and then just be the provider of it. That’s all you need to do. So sending it in a unique format is is probably the easiest thing you can do really. It’s probably easier than fixing any text because what happens when they receive something that sounded like a plug. It’s really not. It’s just it’s trying to explain the point. But but when people receive something that looks different and they’re expecting, say, a PDF and then they don’t get one, but it’s familiar anyway, so they roll with it. What happens is they’re like, oh, interesting.
Adam Hempenstall:
This isn’t how I thought it would look, but it’s bloody cool. Okay. This looks nice. Oh, this is what I said. I said that that was important and that’s on the front. Interesting. Okay. I’ll keep reading.
Adam Hempenstall:
And then they roll through it. And before you know it, you know, they’re happy clients. So just that simple. The, that’s that’s that’s a major thing. That’s a major thing is is giving them something that’s unique and something that’s different. And, you know, I suppose the last thing would be, I suppose, in it from a design perspective, would be don’t use, like, massive walls of text. So just break stuff up. So that if you have to sort of, I don’t know, put, like, a colored block behind it, even if it’s just alternating like a super light gray and white, it just breaks things up a little bit.
Adam Hempenstall:
So visually, there’s, like, oh, that’s a little chunk. That’s a little chunk. That’s a little chunk. So just that kind of thing makes things an awful lot easier to read. Adding imagery is a massive one. There’s so many I mean, I’m sure we’re all, like, Unsplash addicts at this point, but even if people have seen the image before, I’ve all seen the big, you know, big bearded dude. He’s in everything. And the the woman with the floral top, whatever.
Adam Hempenstall:
Like, they’re in they’re on every website on the Internet at this point. But it doesn’t matter. It’s a really they’re nice pictures that are curated and look awesome. So use something like Unsplash and Pexels and things like that to just add an element of like color and ambiance to the website without it just being, you know, screenshots and, you know, boring utility stuff. And then if you do have to use that, then cool. But at least you’ve got something else there to sort of make your copy look interesting.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
I totally agree. What what we’ve tended to do is pepper it with either the stock images like you’ve said Or if this is a creative piece where they’ve they’ve got particular images that they’ve taken or that they have in that, then we’ll actually use some of their stuff as well so that it really helps create that feeling of this is very much about them rather than about us. We’ll still have some of our branding colors. They’ll always know they’re looking at an angled crown proposal. So there’ll be a logo. There’ll be some branding there. But within the copy or within the content, we’ll be quoting them. We’ll actually put some of the things they’ve said as quotes and who said it if we’ve got a meeting with several people as well.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
And we found that’s very effective as well just for yeah. Yeah. So very much like a website, like you said, and, you know, as as kind of something that will split the section up. Because we’ve sent proposals before, which are just pages and pages of text, lots of stuff like, what is WordPress? Like you said, you don’t need to know what WordPress is. They don’t really care. What they do wanna know is, you know, what are they gonna be able to do? You’re gonna be able to create new pages from scratch. You’re gonna be able to create landing pages. You’re gonna be able to edit the phone number at the top of your head or something like that because that’s something they said that was really frustrating about the last guy.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
And they had to email him, and they he didn’t respond for 6 months or whatever it was. You know, all of the all of the oh my gosh. People are still people are saying that in 99. They’re still saying it now 20 years later.
Adam Hempenstall:
It’s crazy.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
I mean,
Adam Hempenstall:
it’s it’s like Yeah. We’ve all known how to eat clean and lift weights. You know? We’ve all known for a long time. Me and
Lee Matthew Jackson:
you mate. I have a really struggle with it.
Adam Hempenstall:
The reason why I said it. Me. Depressed. Like, it’s like, you know, we we all know how to do it, and it’s just a select few to do. And when you do stuff like this, but it’s it’s also realizing that it’s not that hard to do it. And you said something earlier, which is really interesting. You said, like, you would go back through and look through old proposals and then take bits that you liked from those and copy them. And, you know, I’m sure you’ve obviously moved well on from that method of creating proposals anyway.
Adam Hempenstall:
But there’s a reason why that method is bad and I wanna call it out. It’s not a dig at all because we all did it. We all did it and it’s the most natural thing to do. But there’s a reason why it doesn’t work and that’s because you’re taking bits of proposals that you’ve written in different ways for different people for completely different goals and then you mix and match it. It’s actually why I don’t like the idea of the content library concept that our proposal software industry has kind of invented. I think it can be useful in certain ways, but it sort of comes with a bit of a health warning. But look, don’t use this and just save something about client x and then use it on client y’s proposal verbatim. It needs to go through this filter of like, okay, but is this right for John? John’s a guy that’s 47 and he’s got a specific problem.
Adam Hempenstall:
He sat there and he looked me in the eye. He went, I’m scared because this other guy started up across the street from me, and he does the same thing I do. He’s younger. He’s better at everything else, and we’re losing customers. He’s scared. You can’t put in some copy about some much bigger company with some completely different goal. You need to talk to that guy’s problem. Talk to his actual, like, emotional issue there.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Do you
Adam Hempenstall:
know what I mean? Like, sometimes people don’t realize that it’s this is not some cases this is the case, in some cases it isn’t. But in most cases, if you’re selling stuff that’s like I don’t know. I’m just gonna pick a number to sort of divide it. But, you know, 5, $6 and down. Right? There’s probably not a committee of people voting on this, you know. You it’s probably just somebody that’s about to make one of the biggest purchases that they’ve ever made and they’re scared because they’ve they know they’ve got to do it and you’ve got to take the pressure off them. You’ve got to help them make that decision, that positive decision in your favor. And if it isn’t right, you need to also say this is not right for you or this is what I recommend.
Adam Hempenstall:
Look, you you should not be remortgaging a house for this. Just go and use what’s the dirty word? Wix or Squarespace. Like, you know
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Squarespace. We’ve we’ve we’ve recommended Squarespace a lot, mate. I’ll I’ve I’ve I will not deny it. I’ve I think I’ve said that on the podcast before. Sometimes Squarespace is absolutely the solution for someone who just needs to MVP it and doesn’t need to spend that much money yet.
Adam Hempenstall:
Exactly. And that’s alright. No. It’s it’s cool. It’s it’s coming to an end. But the but yeah. You’ve just got to talk to, like do you remember these are people that are scared of stuff? Yes. They might come along and be, yeah.
Adam Hempenstall:
We want to do this. We want to do that and tell you about their big grandiose plans. But, you know they’ve got something that they’re scared about and they’re not going to ask you all the questions, you know. So when you’ve sent the proposal, they are going to sit there and go, I don’t know what to do. I do not know what to do. And that’s going to be sometimes the reaction. So you need to think about that and try and pre address that somehow by bringing up the questions that they can’t ask you. Things like what happens if I do this and it all goes wrong? Can we undo it? What happens if you change something on my website and I lose what few leads I was getting? How do we bring that back? What happens if I give you the password and then you don’t ever return my call again? What happens if you take my deposit and then you run off? They can never ask you those questions because they’re ridiculous questions to ask another person, but you’ve got to bring them up.
Adam Hempenstall:
And if you can bring those up in, you know, in the context of, like, an FAQ or in the context of a little story perhaps, you know, or just in the context of maybe a guarantee or a promise or something like that. At least then they read it and go, oh, they’ve thought of that. And it takes the pressure off and it gives them permission to go ahead with it.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
I like the idea as well with the FAQ. No. No. That was good. With the FAQ as well. I mean, that’s something we took years ago from the WP Elevation template. They had a frequently asked questions section in there as well.
Adam Hempenstall:
It’s great. We were
Lee Matthew Jackson:
able to yeah. Put that at the end as well. So it wasn’t necessarily part of the proposal that was overwhelming because a lot of people do wanna let’s face it. I think we all wanna go through the a lot of people do want it. Let’s face it. I think we all want to go quickly down to the price before we start reading everything else. So a lot of people would would just do that. But the frequently asked questions would we would reference several times, check out the frequently asked questions throughout our document, and then people can then go ahead and check out the the end of that.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
But, mate, I mean, you’ve given us a lot to think about, and I’ve got a lot of writing to do after this episode with regards to the show notes and creating an an intro that’s as awesome as your as your advice. I’d really appreciate, another session with you, to be honest. If I don’t know whether you’d be open to maybe kind of ripping apart one of our proposals. I’ll have to, like, dumb it down and remove any of the personal information, but it would be great to to have a session with you and maybe
Adam Hempenstall:
Well, I tell you what, I do this. I’ve got a I’ve got a little, like, YouTube show that I do when I’ve got time. I call it proposal breakdown, and I take real proposals and I go through them. And obviously, we take out any sensitive parts and censor it in places. But you get the idea. We break down the structure, we critique it, we praise things that are cool, we bring up good ideas, that kind of stuff.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Oh my gosh. I’m breaking it
Adam Hempenstall:
now. It’s great. No. It’s it’s cool because there’s even on the worst ones, there’s always some really good ideas in it and some really good stuff in there that perhaps people haven’t thought of. So there’s always some really, really good, sort of lessons in there, but we can do one literally on a podcast if you want, and then we can talk put the screenshots in and things. That’d be really cool.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah. Alright. Well, we’ll sort something out over the next few weeks. And in the meantime, what are the best ways of people to connect with you, and then we will boot you off the show? With with love, actually.
Adam Hempenstall:
Yeah. So, I mean, I I’m I’m around on our on our live chat. I do an awful lot of customer support. I make a point of that. I outsource the stuff I shouldn’t and stick around doing customer support for some strange reason. So take advantage of that while I can still do it. But, yeah, if you if you have any sort of proposal questions or whatever, you can always just come to the website better proposals dot io or use your link or whatever it is. So, yeah, if you ever do decide to become a customer, then, then a good friend can go and buy some beers on us.
Adam Hempenstall:
And, yeah. So by all means, you know, swing around and and ask any any questions you like, and I’ll be more than happy to give you a hand. Or feel free to try the software. It’s free for 14 days. Plans are super cheap, very freelancer friendly, and there’s a little pay as you go plan as well if you’re quite inconsistent with descending. So, try and accommodate where we can.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
And I feel like you might be in our WP Innovator Facebook group. I could be lying.
Adam Hempenstall:
I am.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
You are. Good. So that’s a plug for me. If you are not a member of the WP Innovator Facebook group, head on over to wpinnovator.comforward/group, where there are tons of crazy awesome WordPress people and agency owners in there sharing lots of problems and solutions and GIFs and cat pictures. So that’s a good place to be as well. Mate, you’re a legend. Thank you so much for your time, and I’m looking forward I’m actually not looking forward. I’m actually dreading the idea of you now looking at my proposal.
Adam Hempenstall:
Have a good one. Look. I’ve done some really awesome awful ones that I you’ll be able to talk about, mate. It’d be great.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah. Yeah.
Adam Hempenstall:
Thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Awesome. Thanks, mate. And that wraps up today’s episode. I’m sure you’ll agree absolutely brilliant. Be sure to check out the show notes. We’ve put some bullets in there to help with your note taking. Also, be sure to check out better proposals. That’s on agency trailblazer.com/betterproposals.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Disclaimer, that is completely an affiliate link. If you buy through that, that’s great because we will get a cup of coffee or a beer in return. Well, actually, it’ll be financed, but, you know, I’m probably gonna buy a beer or a cup of coffee, something like that. And that would be really really nice, but you also don’t have to do that. You can go to better proposals.io as well. Now, if you are not part of our Facebook group, then be sure to check it out over on agencytrailblazer.com/group, and that will redirect you to our vibrant, wonderful, vivacious, completely wrong word, Facebook group full of WordPress developers, WordPress enthusiasts, full of designers, full of really cool awesome people, full of people with beards, full of people without beards, full of people who wear glasses, people who like to share cat pictures, and especially people who like to share GIFs which kind of replace cat pictures I think. With regards to the internet, so this is one of those really long rambling outros, but I definitely recommend that you come and hang out with us in the Facebook group because otherwise you’re just listening to me talk and I would love to talk back with you inside of that Facebook group agency trailblazer.com/group. We will see you there or we will see you in next week’s episode.
