Chapter 1: RFP From Hell

It started back in April. ProdCoX called me and wanted an estimate for what I'd charge to produce 6 hours of video for Major Retail's New Associate Orientation.

You can't whip a number like that out of your back pocket. I told them I needed more information.

I also had a hunch that Major Retail was just getting a competitive outside bid to show how much they could save having Major Retail TV (their in-house production group) produce the job. Needless to say, the whole thing seemed fishy.

"I can send you the RFP," came the offer from ProdCoX's business development maven.

"Great. Send it over," I said.

When I got this monster, it nearly choked my in-box. Clearly, somebody at Major Retail had either been taking night MBA classes at Phoenix University online, or had seen a real RFP and glommed onto it.

But it was written so vaguely, so clumsily, and so heavily weighted in favor of the client, that I quit reading after about page 1.5. I called back ProdCoX.

"This thing's a mess," I said.
"Yeah, I know."
"I don't know what they want. Clearly they don't know what they want."
"I told them about 180 thousand."
"Oh."
Long pause.
"We're not writing the script," Maven continued. "I just put you down for about 2 weeks of production."

"Ok," I continued. "We'll see how they react."

ProdCoX just pulled that number out of the ether. They have the cash and the resources to do the whole project for nothing, so they low-balled. That probably got us to the table, because I really think Major Retail wanted Arch Rival production company to do the job. A high bid from ProdCoX would make it easy to award the job to Arch Rival. A low bid would make it a brawl.

And 2 weeks to produce 6 hours of content was a fantasy. At least in the corporate world it is. We'd never be given enough resources or creative freedom to execute what needed to be done in 2 weeks and it be any good.

But Maven got us to the table. Mabye Maven's not so bad after all. We clashed at first. She clearly doesn't know the first thing about producing, but the first words out of her mouth when we met were, "I was a producer for VH-1."

I always wonder why people stop producing for VH-1, or MTV, or Disney, or Dreamworks. You run into these people all time. They generally work in the midwest, usually at some mid-level production company. The owners of these production companies like to use them as bait to catch unsuspecting clients. "So-and-so works for us. You know they used to produce for VH-1."

These people usually can't wait to tell you that they spent 12 years in broadcast. Or that they worked at such-and-such big network. Recently I had this hot-shot PR man for a gigantic law firm tell me he'd sold two pitches to Schwarzenegger in the '80s. After I read his corporate script, I knew why he was working as a PR guy for a stuffy law firm in mid-America.

Anyway, people like these usually keep their entertainment industry experience veiled--never specific concerning their credits or responsibilities. Go ahead. Look them up on imdb.com. Good luck.

My question is, unspoken of course, since I'm a polite mid-Westerner, "Why aren't you still doing that? Why'd you come back to one of the hottest, most humid, and alternately pointlessly cold places in the universe?" But I never ask. I just let them talk.

All of a sudden, though, I began to think that maybe Maven knew a thing or two. I liked the way this was going.

Introduction: Please Pass the Serial

I was recently awarded the video production for a Major Retail corporation's New Associate Orientation program. I won this working as a contract writer/producer for Production Company X. The competition was really between us and an arch-rival company. Also, Major Retail is ProdCoX's client. If ProdCoX lost this job, they stood to lose the entire account.

We had to win, and I put everything I had into assembling the creative portion of our proposal. We also had a technical side to our proposal. And it was truly a team effort. We all worked together to pull it off. No one person or thing won the job. (Although I'd like to think I played a significant role in assembling a winning proposal.) The other major player I'll call the Mantis. The Mantis is an old ad agency art director who does storyboards for me. He's seen it all, done it all. And he's a great collaborator.

Mantis and I beat through all the creative and developed 5 good proposals upon which we based our whole pitch. ProdCoX wrapped a whiz-bang technical solution around the whole thing.

Here, I'm going to serialize the whole process. I'll try to make it interesting, because it is. I'm not sure it will be profound, but there is ample drama.

The other player is a Human Resources Consulting Firm I'll call Big HR. Big HR won the bid to develop the curriculum and manager the project. ProdCoX and ArchRival were brought in to bid on and compete for the video production based on creative pitches.

Today was our first official meeting with Major Retail, Big HR, me, and ProdCoX. As I got ready at the hotel this morning, I was slightly amazed that I was actually going to be writing and producing a big job for Major Retail. It occurred to me that this could be a career project. I'm relatively young at 34. This is shaping up to be a great opportunity.

But it was the events of today's meeting that inspired me to serialize the whole experience.

By the way, I've decided that Blogging is keeping me from working on any TV specs. I hope this doesn't prove to be a fatal mistake.