The Red Review -Recipes for Winning with Ryn Bennett
In this episode, Jeremy talks to PIE Community founding member Ryn Bennett about the progress of the community and their upcoming Recipes for Winning Online Conference taking place in August.
To sign up for Recipes for Winning 2024 Virtual Conference click here
Find Ryn on LinkedIn Ryn Bennett
Transcript
[00:00.9]
Welcome to the Red Review with me, Jeremy Brim. The Red Review is brought to you by Great Ignition, the transformation and capability development business, all in the work winning space and the bid toolkit, its product set in bid process and training videos. So, hello and welcome to the Red Review podcast with me Jeremy Brim.
[00:22.4]
Hope you've enjoyed the episode so far in this new series. A mixture of one to one conversations, of recordings of some of our webinars, etc. Do give us some feedback and do give us some pointers on who we should be talking to about what, and the things you'd like to hear about.
[00:40.6]
But an important one today, so. Hello Rin. First of all, welcome to the podcast. Howdy. It's great to be here. So returning to the podcast, my friend Rin. So, although a bit different. So we were just talking.
[00:56.0]
Rin, we'll do your introduction and stuff. But we were just talking. We should get it out the way about my friend, our friend Mike Reader. So the last time you're on the podcast was the previous generation, when it was me and Mike, doing this stuff together. And in fact I think you might have been on it twice, you know, but certainly we definitely had some good fun before.
[01:16.3]
Unfortunately, I had to delete all of that back catalogue of episodes because Mike was running for office. He was running to become an mp, a member of Parliament here in the uk. And since we've last spoken, we're just talking about it, he's been successful.
[01:36.2]
So yeah, Mike is now the. It's quite weird being, it's quite a grown up thing having an actual personal friend who's an MP in government. What a bizarre thing. It does make me feel quite old actually along with having a bit of a more of a grey beard since we've got to know each other.
[01:53.5]
So yeah, what, what a funny thing. Hey, but we were just saying that there's a lot of correlation between the skills in winning work and the skills in running a campaign, right? Oh absolutely. I actually I ran for city council in my town, in 2017, after Trump was elected.
[02:12.1]
It was a, it was a failed bid but I did, I surely learned a lot about community building and consensus, and how to how to surprise. How to surprise some folks with interesting new ideas. And so it was a good start for being bold and having new ideas and bringing those into the public.
[02:29.4]
And even though it didn't work out for me, I'M really grateful for it. So I think more people in bidding should try to get government, appointments or get seats, in political arenas. It would be a real advantage for our. Yeah, I think so.
[02:45.3]
We were just discussing off, off camera, weren't we, that there's actually a huge benefit in having someone in government who understands procurement and bidding, how to get suppliers on board effectively, efficiently for the best outcomes with the biggest value.
[03:02.5]
Because so often, yeah, I mean so often everywhere in the world we find that these processes are not runners optimally as they could, could do and certainly, you know, don't get the outcomes. I was just telling you, wasn't I, that are, in the uk, Crown Commercial Services are big central government procurement body are going to run some consultations on their construction services framework agreement rebid that's going to be out later in the year and they've already said they're going to release the tender on the 1st of December.
[03:34.1]
So the bids blatantly going to be over the Christmas period when the framework's been running for years. They've known this time was coming for years. So as I've said before, you're right, the only reasons why you release tenders over the Christmas period or over the summer period is if you're incompetent or bent.
[03:53.8]
But you know, that's. So I'm going to have some interesting consultation events with them when I ask them which one of those two things are they. Because the great thing is because I don't work for an employer anymore, I can say what I like. I just coach people and train people in this stuff.
[04:11.1]
But somebody's got to do it. So hopefully. Anyway, coming back to Mike, we'll have at least one person in government who gets this stuff and, and hopefully can start to pull some levers to do a better job because they're, they're certainly not necessarily doing consistently a good job of this stuff in my space.
[04:26.6]
Anyway, so anyway, we should do introductions, Vin. So welcome back. So give us your full name title your give us a bit of career background and what you currently do for a real job and then we'll get into the exciting stuff of, of PI when we get to it.
[04:41.9]
Sure, sure, sure. So my name is Rin Bennett. My pronouns are they, them, I a.m. a, 16 year tenured veteran of bidding and proposal management. I started my career after college as a chemist so I was initially working for the Department of Defence in chemical demilitarisation where we were destroying VX nerve gas and HD and sarin gas International Treaty Agreement.
[05:06.7]
And then I worked in a steroid testing lab for the NFL and Olympic committees. And then I decided that I wanted to get to get my journalism degree kind of more involved in my life. So I, because I studied both journalism and chemistry and so I went off to become a marketing assistant and the rest is kind of history.
[05:24.2]
I kind of climbed up and have done just about every, just about every type of job you can do in the proposal space. I've had state and local federal commercial bids. I've consulted large organisations as the Director of RFP Excellence at Lupio. So I've had, I've had a really, really diverse set of experiences and currently I am a senior writer at a company that provides educational technology solutions to folks throughout the United States.
[05:52.1]
So virtual tutoring and classroom management stuff like that. So that's, that's what I do for my everyday life right now. And it's been a really, it's been a great career. I've been having a lot of fun. And things have just continued to develop even more over the last or three years. So yes, I'm excited to chat about that.
[06:09.2]
I didn't think you could be any cooler but I didn't realise that you'd been involved in military stuff with nerve gas and all that sort of thing. There you go.
[06:21.7]
Yeah, well we had to wear a gas. No, no, literally there were blasts. There were three foot, three foot blast container walls. They were, they were disassembling rockets in and missiles as well in those facilities. So yeah, it was really. That was my first out of college job and so I had different expectations about what the rest of the world should look like after, after I went into different roles.
[06:41.9]
Oops.
[06:45.7]
How cool is that? So, and we should say because we don't need to cover the same subject today but you, you are the star of a TED Talk. I'm quite a really good one actually that I, I told you denials I watched the other week.
[07:01.7]
And so do if and, and search for that on, on the old TED platform. It's, it's a fascinating talk about some of, some of your journey as well. Which was quite inspiring actually. So please do go and do that. But So. But the other part of your life which you spend an inordinate amount of time and energy on is your PI community.
[07:24.8]
So which people might have come across in, in our Community of bidding proposals capture, but may not have. So could you just give us the background to how, what PI stands for, where it came from, where it's come and a bit of where it's going I guess, and then we'll go from there.
[07:43.6]
Yeah, absolutely. So back in 2022 my co founder of Ben Klein and myself, we were looking at the available offerings from existing providers to help folks learn how to do bidding. And we've been talking about this for years, about how we just weren't really satisfied and the information we were getting from other people and other organisations wasn't helping do our work.
[08:04.4]
Like in a tactical sense it was great theoretically, but it wasn't helping us on the daily, get our work done. And also the community felt like it didn't really suit who we were as people. And so we had one fateful meeting where we decided, hey, we're going to take a run at this on our own and we're going to see if we can build a community of proposal managers that actually suits what we need.
[08:26.5]
So it was kind of a selfish motivation like how do we get folks to talk about what we need? And PIE was formed, so that stands for Proposal Industry Experts. And a part of my complaints with, with what I was seeing in the industry at the moment was the fact that there wasn't a really good forum where I could go ask people questions and I have, I have, you know, how do I use this software in this way?
[08:47.0]
Or how are you conceptualising measuring these things? And you could probably get that information if you went to like an in person event. But as somebody with a chronic illness that makes it really difficult for me to go to in person events, particularly if they're like densely populated. Particularly after that, after that pandemic time it was a really scary, that was a really scary thought to do that.
[09:06.1]
And so we've built PIE on the concept of innovation, inclusion and accessibility where we try to focus on helping folks be able to quickly and easily access proposal management education in a way that is low impact on their life and also helps connect them with the right people. One of our first initiatives which we've actually grown out of but was a pretty neat, a pretty neat choice was we created small micro classes that you could take on your phone and like do, you know, as you're sitting on your lunch break because there was a survey that came out that 75% of proposal managers weren't able to spend time on education.
[09:41.8]
And so they felt like they weren't moving ahead in their careers. Yeah. And since then PIE has grown to be now 1500 members, which is really exciting. We're hosting our second annual conference. The first conference got a 9.6 out of 10 stars. We have, we have an inordinate amount of educational material in our community, but 200 hours plus, easily a weekly podcast and just a really thriving community where if you have a question, you can go and get it answered and you can have meaningful conversations with people about stuff like AI and how it's affecting you or how to measure or how trends are happening in your business.
[10:15.2]
And watching those conversations develop is really exciting. So, yeah, PIE is great. Having a great time. Very good. No, no, I found it quite inspiring, I have to say, because it is a different energy. You guys bring a different energy to this.
[10:30.3]
It's quite dynamic, quite innovative. Different to the usual voices that you hear in the market. And the, the murky world of some of that stuff. So quite vendor agnostic. You've not got any vendors pulling your strings.
[10:47.9]
That's one of the keys, is that we definitely want to make this like a member focused community. And also we try to put people who are in marginalised groups at the front of the line. I'll tell you that for our conference last year we had something like 70% of the presenters represented somebody with a marginalised or multiply marginalised identity.
[11:04.3]
And I think that's why the, that's why the conference was so fantastic is because we reached into pools of people that had never been tapped for their, for their information or their ideas and these great concepts floated up that most of us had never heard about. And so, yeah, that's been a great advantage for us.
[11:21.9]
Very good. Well, we'll come back, come into, how. I'm going to set those stats a little bit, a bit backwards actually, because I'm speaking at your conference in August. So. Yeah, get into that in a second. The other thing, one of the things that put me in, put me on to you guys actually by complete chance, I had a call with a friend of mine that I used to mentor, who is Head of Bids.
[11:44.3]
Well actually she's a partner in one of the world's best known architecture practises. One of the coolest jobs in the world, full stop, let alone in bidding. We're having a call this morning about Captcha and how they might deploy that in their business better and things.
[11:59.7]
But it was Alison, my friend, who put me onto the PI community in the first place or said I should play a part. So having really senior people like that who see the value, who get all of their kids involved, in her ear. She's got a big, big function now.
[12:17.5]
It was fantastic to hear. So, I forgot to tell her I was going to be talking to you today actually. So, yeah, so in terms of your diversity stats, being a fat, white, middle aged straight guy, I'm going to set you back on the path a little bit.
[12:32.6]
But I did, I did notice actually I was very much the thorn in a whole bush of roses, with all of the speakers in my channel, at the conference. And so, Recipes for Winning conference coming up in August, 8th and 9th of August off the top of my head.
[12:50.9]
Yep. And then we have a pre conference on the 7th. Yep. See that's quite cool, isn't it? So tell me about the conference and then we'll come back to what the pre conference bit is because there's some fun to be had there too. So where's the conference come from? How does it work?
[13:07.5]
What types of people have you got involved? All of that kind of stuff, please. Yeah. Great. So there's, there's four tracks. This year we expanded which was really exciting. So we have these kinds of Our organisation is, is focused around three fundamental concepts of people, processes and technology.
[13:22.9]
And the way we codify that within pie because of course we have to do baking metaphors as we have bakers for people, ingredients for technology and recipes for process. So, so each track in the conference kind of follows those themes. So with people with the baking concept you'll go in and you'll find about how to manage your career, how to move ahead into a different industry, how to.
[13:42.1]
There' whole incredible talk that's going to be about how to build a meaningful internship programme so that you can actually cultivate the right types of people to get into your space. And the inimitable, unique Walcott is going to be presenting that in ingredients. We're really obviously heavily focusing on AI this year.
[13:58.3]
So that technology piece is coming through but there's also other technologies and, and you know, different methods of using technologies including using, using software to do market research that we're bringing into that space as well. For the recipes track, it's process.
[14:15.0]
So how do I go faster, better, higher, quality, less cost. Right. And how do I make sure that my customers are still engaged? And then finally this year, which is really Exciting. We added the Kitchen Talk, track which is designed to help people who are either existing consultants or people who have wanted, wanted to become consultants.
[14:32.3]
How do you get that off the ground? How do you remain authentic to yourself and how do you get that information into people's hands so that you can have a winning consultancy? So, so that's it. We have a 40, 40 speakers over a two day span. This year we actually had to cut back on the networking a little bit which was still there.
[14:48.5]
But we just had so many amazing talks that came through. One of the great things is that this is entirely virtual though. And so even if we don't have structured networking sessions, you can be chatting with hundreds, of other people in the industry ad hoc and building those relationships. And so yeah, it's a, attend the conference in your PJs kind of vibe, which is great, very good.
[15:09.7]
And a key point, selling point that I forgot to remind you, is that it is recorded. So there's a couple of things, there's a couple of big deals here. First of all, the conference is free if you're a member. And being a member isn't that much money in the grand scale of things at all.
[15:28.3]
I think over the course of a year you'd probably spill more in wine on the dance floor than you would to pay for this membership. Is the way that I would put it. Or it's a, it's, you know, a few coffees. So the, the membership's wrapped in but also all of the sessions are recorded and accessible. Was it for a year?
[15:44.3]
For one year afterwards, yes. Yep. Yeah. So I mean that's, that's really valuable I would say because I, I saw some interactions online where people saying, oh, I can't make that date and you know, you were highlighting to them that they can catch up online. So yeah, that's, that's really fantastic actually.
[16:00.5]
Yeah, you need to be able to be able to do that. So we'll come back to the pre conference thing. I should just promote my little talk then. So I'm UK time. I am 4:30pm on Friday the 9th. So I'm in the gin and tonic slot.
[16:17.6]
I would say on a Friday afternoon. Hopefully. Hopefully or I might be in the sort of woosa, we've just submitted our bids recovery phase where they've just submitted a bid at 4 o', clock, you know, after a long week. So you'll be able to catch my talk, if you're still around at 4:30 or perhaps more likely I guess catch up on the recording and Netflix Special perhaps.
[16:40.7]
But obviously the others all around the world in the States etc that will be earlier in the day for, for you guys. So, but talk to me about the pre con. The pre conference bit ring as well. Right. Rather different. Yeah, it's incredible. So again trying to solve problems for proposal writers, most of us don't get very good feedback or coaching on our actual writing.
[17:04.9]
So I know that my boss over the years hasn't been somebody who was necessarily proficient at writing bids. It was a lot of times salespeople who don't specialise in this topic. Right. And so as a consequence the education that we get, the coaching that we get is often so 30,000 foot and it doesn't help us understand how our writing or how our company's writing is contributing to a success or a loss.
[17:28.1]
So we brought in a copy editing genius. Chris Gillespie is one of the best copywriters, and his organisation, Fenwick Media, some of the slickest copywriters in the business right now. And what can happen with this particular pre conference is you can bring your actual bids like something you've actually written, something somebody else from your company has written and they are going to dissect it and help you understand how the writing could have been better.
[17:55.6]
So instead of just saying like this is a general principle about how you can write better, you're getting in there and actually able to get your hands dirty, pull apart what your practise looks like and everybody's agreeing to play nice and not divulge anything if they have competitors that are there, it's fully confidential, it's not recorded and so what you get that hands on experience and that's I think a really unique opportunity and that's it's an additional $80 on top of the conference cost.
[18:23.0]
But I think it's worth every penny. Oh I absolutely agree, absolutely agree. And it is funny enough, I've got a load of post it notes on my windows here in my studio, all of the things, because I'm heading meandering into my summer period where things go quieter for the business.
[18:38.9]
No one wants to be trained in the summer in the UK anyway. So we do a lot of projects over the summer, rebuilding all of our content etc. But similarly actually we're going in our bid writing courses. We're going to go another step further in we're a bit different in that we don't just turn up and train people in our curriculum.
[19:01.5]
We have a design call with them before we get into delivery, where we shape the content to suit the challenges they've got, the market they face. But we also ask them for copies of RFPs, ITTS and their responses and then build some real exercises to take place through the training.
[19:19.9]
Breaking questions down, storyboarding, reviewing content, as you say, for readability, how the balance between features, benefits, evidence, etc. So we're making it even more practical in that regard.
[19:35.3]
I was having a call with a client this morning about that very thing. So I can absolutely see, in fact 80 bucks is embarrassingly cheap for that. I would charge hilariously more money for that. So yeah, well done. That'll be really very valuable for people out there as well.
[19:52.3]
So how much was the conference again? Or membership that involved includes the conference ring or how does that work? Sure. So we're past the early bird special deadline. We had been selling for 65. Now it's up to 75. Which is again for 40 sessions.
[20:07.4]
An absolute steal. If you just want to attend the conference for the conference and the pre, con, you just add 80 onto that. So it's 155 for additional, for additional support from Benwick. But here's the deal. It's number one. If you have an annual membership, which is $183 US then or $17 a month, you can attend the conference at no cost.
[20:28.6]
So that is, that is a huge differentiator for us. Instead of having to drop thousands of dollars to go to a conference, stay at the hotel. Again, part of this is that we're all very Covid conscious. So we want to make sure that everybody who has, who has challenges around that or disabilities or any caretaking roles.
[20:43.8]
Right. If you can't make it to an in person event, you're going to be able to make it to this. So we bake that in and it's a substantial savings over that. And then, so if you, if you purchase the membership, you get the conference for free. If you decide that you want the membership after the conference, you can apply whatever you paid towards the conference to that annual membership as well.
[21:03.0]
So say I attend the writing workshop for 155. An annual membership on top of that will only be 30 additional dollars. So it's yeah, it's a steal. It's a steal. And we do this because we want that accessibility piece is so important. There are new people who are starting off in this, who don't get their companies to pay for their memberships to whatever it is.
[21:20.4]
And as a consequence they can't move forward in the industry and they can't gain new skills because everything is so expensive. And so here's a low cost alternative. And yeah, we're not working with sponsors. So you show up to the conference, you're not going to get sold to. You show up, you learn, you network, you support your own abilities. We have other sponsored activities that you can go to if you want to learn about software.
[21:38.4]
But the conference is, is sacred and we don't, we don't have that. So it's, it's a totally different model. It's going great. It really is, isn't it? Very different. Very good, very good. So that, yeah, that's exciting. That, that's really exciting and a great thing for the community.
[21:57.5]
Well, I hope it's a wild success. I'm certainly going to be supporting you moving forwards with these things. Because I need a home for how we give back and our CSR and how we help community build. So very welcome back on the podcast anytime, Rin, when there's new stuff that you're launching or interesting things that you're doing.
[22:20.5]
And I look forward to playing a part in the community myself and the conference. I look forward to getting in amongst it with the agenda and understanding what's going on. Great, great, great. Thank you. So the way to register for this is just to visit proposalindustryexperts.com we've got all the links available for you to get started either with membership or with the conference specifically.
[22:38.8]
So, off you go. Very good. And where can people find you? Is it LinkedIn? Yeah, on LinkedIn. Let me, let me validate what my LinkedIn profile in on Instagram. It's, it's underscore. It's or it's. I'm sorry, it's on.
[22:55.0]
It's the word. Its underscore. Rin for the win. If you want to do that. I'm pretty sure my LinkedIn is the same. How fantastic is that handle? Thank you. Yeah, it's the same, the same on Instagram, but no, it's so just Rin for the win. R, Y, N for the win.
[23:10.4]
Yep. Excellent. Okay. And yeah, on LinkedIn too. Good. Okay, well look forward to seeing you at the conference. Thank you very much. We'll keep talking. Thank you. Have a great, have a great day for you evening for me. Cheers. Cheers. Thanks thank you.
