Mini CVs and pen portraits for management consultants

When inviting a bid, clients sometimes ask you to include mini biographies, also known as pen portraits, of the potential team. Here, we show you  how to treat this as an opportunity to sell your company.  Focusing on the client’s needs and objectives is just as important in this section as it is in every other part of a bid.

Most people read shorter, more easily digested chunks of information first. Mini CVs tend to (or at least should) fit this brief, so clients will often read these during their first flick through the bid document. It may even be the first section they read – and therefore your first opportunity to sell your team and your company.

On the other hand, the client may read them once they have pretty much made up their minds to use you – in which case you want to confirm in their minds that you have assembled the right team for the job.

Consider whether you want to include every potential team member, or just the senior figures. Do you know exactly who will be on the team, or will that be decided later? To keep it concise, perhaps write full portraits for the key members of the team and give just a brief outline of other potential team members.

Your CV summaries need to be as targeted as the rest of the bid. So be sure to:

•  keep them short
•  give only relevant information
•  use specific examples
•  tie all information back to the project in hand
•  avoid clichés (such as ‘client-centred advice’ and ‘proactive’).

Don’t do this

David Stevens qualified as a management consultant in 1986 while at Smith Watson. He joined our Barking office when it was still owned by Stanford Prentice, a local management consultancy that had been established in the region for more than 80 years.

David has worked for a wide and varying range of clients, and has experience of working with retail, law, agriculture, manufacturing and voluntary-sector organisations. He is also the author of a number of management consultancy guides, including The Stevens Method, which was first printed in 1995 and has been reprinted twice since.

He is married to Clara and has two children – James and Isobel. He is also an avid football fan and sits on the board at Lincoln City FC.

Instead, do this

David Stevens – Senior Consultant

David’s role will be to:

•  Keep you up to date through regular project meetings.
•  Control and authorise the project’s progress and be accountable for achieving its objectives.

David has focused on work with retail businesses in the past five years, before which he specialised in voluntary-sector organisations. He is therefore particularly adept at designing and building new operating processes in businesses such as this, as well as delivering robust communication plans to ensure that all employees are engaged with the objectives of the project.

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Author: Tom Wilde

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After working for years as a client relationship and project manager for two major media owners and over a decade as sales director at Emphasis, what Tom doesn't know about project management, business development and client liaison isn't worth mentioning. (So we won't.)