Why I Don't Do RFPs: How I Actually Work With Firms

I get asked, occasionally with real puzzlement, why I do not respond to RFPs. Firms assume it is a capacity problem, or a pricing objection, or that I have not seen the opportunity. None of those are it. It is a structural objection, and it is worth explaining plainly rather than leaving it as an unexplained policy on a page somewhere.

What an RFP actually optimizes for

A request for proposal, especially one routed through a procurement portal, is a document designed to compare vendors on paper before anyone in the room has to take responsibility for a decision. That is not a criticism of the people who write them, it is what the format is built to do: spread accountability across a committee so no single person owns the choice of who gets hired. I have sat on both sides of this table now, and the pattern is consistent. The firms that route hiring through an ownerless process are, structurally, the firms least able to actually commit to building something, because nobody in the process is empowered to say yes on the spot.

Why that matters more for systems work than for most services

Building a matter-management system, or any of the practice systems I build, requires a specific kind of commitment that an RFP process is bad at producing: someone inside the practice who owns the process being systematized, who will sit with me while I ask the paper-first questions, and who has the authority to say "yes, this is how the matter actually works" without escalating that answer to a committee. A procurement process built to avoid a single point of accountability is structurally opposed to the thing the engagement actually needs.

I will not run a pilot for a room that cannot say yes. A demo for a committee is not a project. It is a delay with a calendar invite, and I have watched enough of those consume months without ever converting into a real build to stop participating in them by choice.

What I do instead

I build for a named person, not for a process built specifically to avoid having one. That means the engagements I take start with a direct conversation, usually a call, with whoever actually owns the problem, the managing partner who is tired of watching intake leak revenue, the solo practitioner who knows exactly which matter type eats the most unbilled time, the GC who has already tried and failed to get a generic tool to fit their actual process. That person does not need to prepare a formal proposal request. They need to describe the problem honestly, and I need to be honest back about whether a build is actually the right answer.

The honesty part is not a sales line

If a build is not actually the honest answer to a practice's problem, I say so instead of selling one anyway. This shows up more often than people expect: sometimes a practice's actual problem is a pricing decision, not a system, and the honest answer is a conversation about fixed fees, not a six-week build. Sometimes the practice needs a $9 playbook and three weeks of their own paper-first work before any software conversation makes sense at all. An RFP process has no mechanism for a vendor to say "you don't need what you are asking for," because the format assumes the need is already settled and only the vendor is in question. A direct conversation has room for that honesty. A procurement portal does not.

What this costs me, and why I accept it

Saying no to RFPs means saying no to some genuinely large firms and genuinely real budgets, because plenty of institutions simply cannot hire any other way, their own internal policy requires the portal regardless of what the practice actually needs. I accept that trade deliberately. The alternative, taking on engagements through a process built to avoid ownership, produces exactly the outcome you would predict: a build that nobody inside the firm actually championed, that stalls at the first moment of ambiguity because no single person feels responsible for resolving it, and that gets quietly shelved a year later. I have watched that happen to other people's engagements enough times to know it is not worth the revenue.

How to actually reach me

There is no account manager and no intake form designed to filter you before a human sees it. Every message lands with me, and I am the one who writes back. If you are the person who owns the problem, tired of watching a specific process fail in a specific way, that is the conversation I want to have, and it starts with an email or a call, not a procurement number.