Proposal Writing

We have been pretty busy during the last weeks. Not only with planting trees, but also with (re)writing our businessplan. In June we sent a summary to the Business in Development Network (http://www.bidnet.org/). This organisation tries to match investors (the people with money) to entrepreneurs (the people with brains and guts). They also organise a competition where the best business plans are awarded prizes up to 20,000 Euro.

This year more than 4000 people submitted a summary. Everyone who got through the first round would get comments from a professional business coach and the writers of the very best plans would get help from a coach to write the full plan. So at the beginning of August we, and 2000 others, were informed that we got through to the second round. This did not really surprise us, we have a good plan and Kees can write a mean business plan, if he says so himself. What did surprise us (slightly ;-)) is that we got no comments on our summary and that we would get a coach to help us write the final plan. So ours was one of the best out of 4000 submissions.

Having one of the best plans to start with and a coach to make it even better, means we have amore than average chance to win one of the prizes. Therefore we decided to put a lot of effort in the complete business proposal to get the most out of our coach and to maximise our chances of winning a prize. Rewriting the original plan was not the problem. According to our coach, the text is excellent. But getting al the numbers right was slightly more difficult for us, since we had very little experience with business economics. The organisation had provided a worksheet to be completed and that was somewhat complicated. We had no clue what ´reteined earnings´ or ´NPV´ were (now we do) and there were a few other hurdles. Communication with the coach was always via e-mail, which did not make matters easier. But we managed to get all the numbers matching where they should be matching, largely thanks to our coach. Last weekend we uploaded the plan, well in advance of the deadline (3 Sept midnight Central European Time). And now we wait. The winners will be anounced in October.

And since we were busy writing anyway, we also decided to submit a proposal to the ´Green Picnic Challenge´ of teh Dutch postcodeloterij (zie http://www.postcodeloterij.nl/GoedeDoelen/PICNICGreenChallenge.htm.)
There will be only be one winner, but the prize is half a million Euro! We had a bit of a brainstorm (well, it was more like a light summer´s breeze to be honest) and submitted a proposal for activities that would be additional to the business plan we submitted to BiD. We do not hold our breath on this one, but you never know, Kees can, after all, write a good proposal...

Ps. No photo´s, because we thought pictures of us behind a computer are not very exiting...