A different kind of proposal.

The tension

Ruhnau Clarke was a proposal volume shop, and an understaffed one. Most firms that answer this many RFPs lean on corporate templates: the same cover, the same layout, the same boilerplate every time. It reinforces the firm's brand identity and makes proposals as efficient as possible to produce. It also tells every client the same story, about the firm.

What set Ruhnau Clarke apart was how deeply project teams listened to a client's needs and vision. A templated proposal hid that at the very first point of contact.

Disrupt the expectation

So the proposals broke the pattern. Reviewers expected another stack of look-alike submissions. Instead, each Ruhnau Clarke proposal reflected the client back to themselves: their identity, their hopes, and their vision for the project, in their own terms.

That gave selection committees a tangible experience of being heard before a single meeting. The proposal itself became the first proof of how the firm works. That's experiential branding: the brand is what the client experiences, not the logo on the cover.

I directed the design of every one, down to the imagery. For Ventura Unified's Pacific High School agriculture program, that meant putting livestock on the cover, because that's what the program is about. Each of the examples below was made for its district alone.

Teach it

A shift like this only works if the whole team can carry it. I taught my team what experiential branding meant and how to execute it, so the client-first approach held up across dozens of proposals a year, not just the ones I touched.

Assess and aim

It started with an assessment of the firm's growth stage and marketing function, worked through with leadership to decide where to aim: market position, a client-centered voice, and the proposal practice, with predictive demography to choose where to compete.

Speak

Efficiency had to come from somewhere other than a template. The language that won was collected into a library, so each new effort started from what already worked rather than a blank page. That let a small team make every proposal feel bespoke and still take on far more of them.

Prove

I joined Ruhnau Clarke as marketing director in 2019 and took over direction of the proposal practice in 2020: the client-first strategy, vetting, go/no-go decisions, interview strategy, and coaching.

The numbers count two kinds of work. Formal proposals, the full submissions shown below, were mine to direct: they grew from 29 to 74 decided a year, and 58% were won outright or advanced to interview. Alongside them, principals wrote shorter letter and fee proposals, supported by a HubSpot CRM I designed, built and implemented around how the firm wins work. Counting both, the firm went from 63 to 161 proposals decided a year at about 76% success.

In 2026, I designed and built an Airtable system with AI agents that moved administrative work to an admin, so senior staff could focus on development.

Relationships and direct invitations succeeded about 85% of the time. Beyond K-12, medical proposals won 65% and commercial 77%.