In this scenario, you are the Director of West Coast Consultants, a small consulting firm that regularly employs a team of independent consultants on a contract basis. For the past month, your team has been researching, drafting, and revising a bid for a large contract that would have provided two years of work to the team.
You were short-listed for the bid and invited to present to the potential client, Pacific Rim Development, Inc. Unfortunately, you have just received the news that you lost the bid to another company that quoted a lower fee to the client. The client praised your proposal and presentation, but money was ultimately the deciding factor. The client is under pressure from its parent company to cut costs as much as possible, and your proposal not only quotes a respectable wage for each consultant but also reflects the higher cost of fair trade and environmentally sustainable practices. Your team is built around these ethical principles.
Your team has not only put in extra hours of unpaid work in preparation for the bid, they are now without any guaranteed work for the future. You know many of them are worried about what comes next. You know of several other projects that your team could bid on, but that would require a further investment on their part of time and effort to put together strong proposals for those projects.
You want to boost their morale and recognize their hard work and expertise, and potentially identify some practical supports for team members, who mostly work in isolation at their home computers. You also want them to continue to work for you.
Assignment Instructions:
Write a memo to your team breaking the bad news of the lost contract bid. Plan and organize your message using the strategies for negative writing situations described in your textbook. You should also implement the strategies for effective professional communication described in the earlier chapters of the textbook. You can add or invent details as needed to produce an effective message. You can personalize the consulting team and match their areas of expertise to your particular career field. Do not copy wording from the scenario, but you may keep the company names and basic terms like consultant, contract, and bid.
Sample Solution