How we got here...
Our origin story
How we got started...
Carl Dickson started CapturePlanning.com in 2001 as a membership-driven site to help people learn how to find business opportunities and win more contracts. He had some great content and wanted to sell it. But he wanted to take advantage of the web and not just put it out there as books. He went with a membership model so that he could offer an entire library and not have to sell every title separately.
The site has grown every year since then. It went from a side gig to Carl's consulting work, to his primary gig leaving little time for consulting, and then to a mature publishing company.
By 2008 CapturePlanning.com had published over a dozen tutorials and more than 200 articles. We lost track of the number of articles somewhere above 500. Along the way our site had attracted over 25 million visits and over 10,000 paying customers as of the end of 2015.
The origin of the MustWin Process
In 2008, Carl was doing regular speaking engagements and was doing one on the problems with Red Teams when he realized that those problems would never be solved.
It was an awkward moment.
He went on to publish a couple of whitepapers that spelled out the reasons why the way people were trying to do things would never work. He expected to encounter resistance from people defending the status quo, but instead Carl found a groundswell of le were tired of a review process that sometimes seemed like it wasn't even worth the bother. Naturally they challenged him to come up with a replacement.
So CapturePlanning.com published the MustWin Process in 2009 and offered a new approach that showed what to do in order to be ready to win at RFP release, turn that into a plan for preparing the content of the proposal, and then validate that the content reflects what it will take to win. Instead of being based on phases or how things were typically done, it was based on what it takes to win. It seemed like such a simple things to build the process around the needs of the stakeholders. And yet...
Launching PropLIBRARY
By 2011, the membership side of CapturePlanning.com had outgrown it's original website. So CapturePlanning.com created a new resource for its members called PropLIBRARY. PropLIBRARY took all the content that CapturePlanning.com had published over the previous 10 years and turned it into a dynamic tool. Now the MustWin Process goes beyond it's book origins and provides just-in-time inspiration, guidance, and online training.
In 2016 we launched a new and much improved version of PropLIBRARY. The user interface changed but the content remained. It just became more accessible.
The CapturePlanning.com Network
We currently reach over 100,000 professionals every week through our network of websites, the LinkedIn groups we moderate, mobile apps we've developed, and our email newsletter. This audience, vets our content, gives us feedback, and inspires us through discussion. And does business with us. Thank you for all of that.
Access to premium content items is limited to PropLIBRARY Subscribers
A subscription to PropLIBRARY unlocks hundreds of premium content items including recipes, forms, checklists, and more to make it easy to turn our recommendations into winning proposals. Subscribers can also use MustWin Now, our online proposal content planning tool.
Carl Dickson
Carl is the Founder and President of CapturePlanning.com and PropLIBRARY
Carl is an expert at winning in writing, with more than 30 year's experience. He's written multiple books and published over a thousand articles that have helped millions of people develop business and write better proposals. Carl is also a frequent speaker, trainer, and consultant and can be reached at carl.dickson@captureplanning.com. To find out more about him, you can also connect with Carl on LinkedIn.
