Zatera Ul

Good luck, Steve, in your new small business gig!

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It’s even more different at a very small company like the one I work for, where the entire company can meet around a single conference table. MFH works for a somewhat larger small company, one that’s large enough to have its own employee handbook with annoying company policies.

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This has been a fun week, work-wise. I had a deadline for a research proposal yesterday (to that government entity that sometimes manages to get things up into space in one piece), and it didn’t really start taking shape until almost the last day. The trouble is that I was leading the proposal writing, while the two guys with all the technical details that it needed were on vacation. Since my progress on it was slow, I chose to work a full day on Monday.

Finally we got it looking almost respectable. The only piece left was the proposal budget — we were including a subcontractor/consultant in our bid, a guy who works for a fairly large company, and he just could not get the financial people there to give us a simple, straight answer on what they were going to charge us for his time. They insisted on putting some sort of elaborate financial document together, and could not be dissuaded. (Compare this to my company, where I basically worked out the entire project budget myself, with a little help.) Meanwhile, to get our proposal in before the deadline, we had to submit it with an approximate subcontract value, instead of the (few) numbers that we really needed. While our proposal has a low probability of being funded anyway (but not zero–the agency surprised us last year by funding our proposal), this omission doesn’t help our chances.

Then, this afternoon, I received their elaborate financial proposal–five pages too long and a day too late!! I couldn’t help but laugh and laugh. I had the pleasure (after consultation with my boss, company VP) of writing back and essentially saying thank you, it looks very nice, but really we needed it before the deadline yesterday, and had to do the best we could without it.