“If it was up to me, the RFP would be one sentence. Make it look good.”
That’s how the frustrated Director of Engineering started the conversation. He was clearly unhappy that he was about to start yet another round of sifting through Landscape Maintenance proposals.
Two years ago, he’d hired a landscape contractor that seemed entirely capable of taking care of his resort’s landscaping. They said all the right things. They had good references. They had been in business for a while, and they seemed really excited about the opportunity to work at his resort.
But for the last 6 months, they just hadn’t been able to keep up. Their service teams that used to be 6-man crews were down to 4-man crews. Their trucks and equipment that used to look new and clean, were starting to look dirty and seemed to break down all the time.
When the guests started to notice that his property didn’t look like the pictures they’d seen online, he knew he had to make a change. And he had to make it quick.
He’d never had a formal RFP template before. Two years ago, he just sent out the service calendar that one of his old landscapers had given him. He narrowed the field down to his top three choices, but in the end, he went with his gut and he chose the company that seemed like the best bargain. Less than 2 years later, he now realized he couldn’t make the same mistake again. It was time for a formal RFP process, but building an RFP from scratch is a lot of work and he knew he didn’t have the time to put into it.
So, why can’t you have a one sentence RFP?
Just make it look good.
That should be all the instruction it takes, right?
First, we need to understand that an RFP is not a magic bullet. You can have the most detailed RFP process, with exhaustive specifications, detailed service area maps, and a fair and logical scoring system, but still end up with a landscape contractor that doesn’t live up to your expectations.
RFPs were invented as a way to standardize how we purchase products. Products don’t come with all the variables that services do. It’s pretty easy to tell if the TV you bought meets your specs. Ongoing landscape maintenance service? That's a much harder thing to evaluate.
With services, what you’re really buying is the result they produce. Until you hire someone and the do the work, you can’t really see if they’re capable or not. Even then, the key trait of a great service provider is consistency in the results they produce over time.
How is an RFP going to predict that?
The goal of the RFP process and the documentation you create is to make sure all the proposing companies are on the same playing field from the start. There’s nothing more frustrating than five different landscape companies bringing back pricing that’s all over the board. You want to leave the proposing companies no room to cut corners and that you’re comparing apples to apples.
The problem that RFPs create is that we sometimes start to think of them as a prescription for how the contractor should do the job after it’s awarded. An RFP isn’t meant to tell the contractor how to do their job. It’s meant to be a guideline for their proposal, making sure that all the competing companies include the same services and frequencies.
In this post we're kicking off a multi-part blog series, where we’ll offer our thoughts on some of the most challenging parts of constructing a well written and thorough RFP document.
If you need an RFP template to start from, please feel free to download our free Landscape RFP Template here. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be updating and adding to the thoughts we first published in the template, so make sure to come back and read our future posts in this series.
In our next post, we’ll discuss why the Introduction isn’t just the fluff at the beginning. It’s the most overlooked and underutilized section of an effective RFP.
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