Company Profile

[Penexus Consulting Company Profile]

  PENEXUS CONSULTING

.

©2010

COMPANY PROFILE

Corporate History and Overview

Penexus Consulting is a trade name of JK smith Int’l an entity recognized by Nigeria’s Corporate affairs Commission. It essentially stands out as focused on Business Development related issues with a major in Business proposal development and training. We help organizations and Companies to Conceptualize and develop, market penetration strategies, using the latest technologies to provide practical, user-friendly solutions for small and medium-sized businesses, home-office entrepreneurs, professionals, middle managers and executives.

The company is a privately-owned business and is currently in the process of opening offices in different parts of the country to better cover new emerging markets. At the present we operate from No 3 Oja Bus Stop, Ajasa Command Off Abule Egba Lagos.

Since 2005, we have successfully rendered services to companies all over the nation and outside the country. In the second half of 2010 alone, we were able to raise up to $75,000 in grant and sponsored deals for our clients, because we started the company with the goal of helping clients make the most of opportunities, we are essentially open to new ideas and one of our core strength is based on consistent research in our major focus areas which includes Basic Business development and of recent Human capacity development.

Today, Penexus Consulting is carving a Niche for itself in a field that is relatively new to the Nigerian market and the Lead Strategist Mr Ajibade Oluwaseun is fast becoming one of the most sought after conference speakers in Business development issues.

Our mission is to empower small and mid-size businesses with strategic business growth skills and business development soft wares; an example of which is the penexus business kit(a software package that solves all the writing needs of Growing Businesses). Being an innovative and technology-savvy organization, we strive to help our clients reach their full market potential. We are continually working to improve existing products and services and to introduce new ones to satisfy SMB needs

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Mission

By providing an essential range of Smart Business Solutions, we aspire to be renowned for our capacity to assist our customers in becoming more competitive, in a world where businesses transact at an unprecedented speed. Excited about what the future holds, we would like to lead our customers to the next level, one day at a time.

[Company Profile | 2010 2 [Type the document title] | [Pick the date]

Our Business Model

Penexus Consulting markets and supports its products and services through co-marketing agreements and strategic partnerships with online providers, resellers and marketing firms. In addition to our own expertise, we foster close ties to a select group of value-added resellers to provide clients with specialized knowledge and regional expertise.

Penexus consulting’s Company profile

Most important element of a grant proposal.

 This last week was very interesting as my interaction with other professionals in the proposal development really yielded great and outstanding reports as such the answers to my simple question were gotten from three professionals.

Hamutal Gouri • An Isreali Citizen and Founder of Consult4good: she's commited to using her professional skills to promote social change, equality and justice. With more than 20 years of experience as a project manager, consultant to social change groups and progressive foundations and as a certified group facilitator, She has a rich experience in planning and facilitating training workshops, specializing in social marketing, donor relations and effective presentations.
 Her answer was simple:
 What a great question! Foundations' officers and public officials recieve and read humdreds - if not thousands - of grant proposals every year. When you've read that many proposals, you learn to read between lines and beyond the standart grant-writing launguage. When I read a proposal I look for the following, not necessarily in that order:
1. Strong vision/mission statement: not what we want to do, but what we want to achieve;
2. Signs that the applicant is a"learning organization" - that its workplan is based on information and data gathered from its various stakeholders, that it has scanned well its environmnet, knows its potential partners, etc
3. Innovation and passion: non profit work is often challanging and cesific: I look for ways in which the applicant is seeking to overcome challanges using creative thinking and fostering passion and committment
4. "Walking the walk" - non profits often have lofty ideas and great values: I'm interested in seeing how they come to play in an applicant's organisational structure, models of work and interventions, participatory mechanisms, diversity, gender mainstreaming, etc
5. Professionalism: is the applicant offering models based on best practices?
6. Sustainability and community building: foundations and institutional grants can only account for part of the organizational budget. I would tend to give preference to applicants that invest in community building and grassroots fundraising to build long term sustainability

This is not an exhaustive list, but these are some of the components I look at when I read a proposal and when I train non profits in writing them.

 For Joseph Mayerhoff, the answer was succint enough to be cramed:

 Joseph Mayerhoff • As proprietor of Grant Write, I have been writing grant proposals for the past ten years. My view is that the most important part of the grant proposal is the budget. I believe that any good grant writer or general writer can write a needs statement or a proposal that is good enough to get a funder's interest, but I think they get turned off by "pie in the sky" budgets. Budgets need to be thorough and reasonable without being so low that the project cannot succeed and so high that the funder feels that it is being taken advantage of.

 More

From Jitesh Panda a development consultant with 17 years of experience in India, The three most important element of grant proposal would be - Relevance of the proposed intervention, Experience & expertise of the organization/individual seeking grant; and finally Budget/Financial Details. 

I hope this will suffice and help in directing you when next you focus your grant proposal. See you next time. 

Sample event proposal

Please note the order of this sample. It is a simple letter proposal remember my KISS (Keep it short and simple) principle in proposition?
Now it is not compulsory you copy and paste, just try and understand the format and try to create your own specific audience targetted proposal
Event Coordinator; Enclosure; Opportunity; Audience: Information; Benefits; Creative Implementation and the Call for Action
 Enjoy reading through it.
BlackBerry Torch 9800 Phone (AT&T)
 
Date
Contact
Title
Company
Address
City, State, Zip
Dear Sponsor Contact:
I am contacting you at the suggestion of (Contact Name, you) regarding a unique sponsorship opportunity for
(Company).
On August 25, 2008, (Organisation) of (City name) will host a cocktail party and drawing a student populace that cuts across all tribes in the nation. This event, titled (Event theme), will attract over 250 student from  (School name/ community).
Last year, (Event theme) drew 225 attendees and the participation of 5 commercial bank bosses as main speakers. It was cosponsored by (Company name) and marketed as a
networking event for business and professionally inclinedstudents in (location/Community name)  The event drew an affluent audience. Some 60 percent of the attendees purchased products from the event and an additional 10 percent joined (Your group name) of (Community) as members based on their experience.
We invite (Company) to be the exclusive accessories boutique represented at (Program Theme))for
2011. In addition to being listed on all advertising and press as a sponsor of the event, (Company) will
have the opportunity to host a booth at the event to display products.
Sponsorship benefits such as promotional coupons in all purses included the raffle may be used to drive
traffic to (Company) after the event.
We hope to have the opportunity to share our full presentation of sponsorship benefits with you in the
near future.
I will contact you on (date, time) to determine if a meeting is warranted. In the meantime, please do not
hesitate to contact me at (phone number/email) with any questions.
Sincerely,
Name

THE WORTH OF YOUR PROPOSAL- What decision Makers look out for.

Acer Aspire AS5251-1805 15.6-Inch Laptop (Black)Toshiba Satellite L645D-S4036 LED TruBrite 14-Inch Laptop (Black)In my last article I made mention of the fact (although briefly) that a lot of the times, most proposals are rejected on the basis that they are perceived as cloned proposals. What you should add to that however is that, that is only used some of the times as a pre-screening edge. Once you are able to scale this hurdle, you face the other criteria used by decision makers in the choice of which consultant/group has the advantage over the others. 

A result of recent researches published by Oxford University Press in 2000 and called Simple Heuristics that Make Us Smart has documented for the first time, how people actually make decisions. An interdisciplinary team, based at the Max Planck Institute for human development (Berlin and Munich) and the University of Chicago published the results of extensive inquiries into the methods people use for making decisions quickly, based on Minimal amount of information.

It was discovered from these researches that these simple heuristics are the same set of decision making strategies we’ve always used since childhood, during “multiple option” examinations in our schooling years, in our personal lives and also in business. They are hard wired into our brains and also a part of our evolutionary survival package. The same decision strategies were the ones that helped our ancestors, though they never had so much survival gadgets as we do today, yet they still had to make crucial choices that helped them survive.

To determine whether people use these techniques in making Proposal related business decisions, World Renowned Consultant Tom Sant Conducted experiments for over a year in which he distributed a proposal for internet security services to groups of business professionals where he asked them to evaluate the proposal, noting the time it took them to reach a decision either for or against the offer being made in the proposal. 

To be able to properly organize our proposal for acceptance, we must get into the mind of the decision-makers. Whether you are making a 4 page service proposition or a 125 page response to an RFP, these factors should be taken into proper consideration and I shall delve into them more extensively next week.Panasonic KX-TG6545B DECT 6.0 PLUS Expandable Digital Cordless Answering System with 5 HandsetsVtech CS6219-2 DECT 6.0 Expandable 2-Handset Cordless Phone System with Caller ID and Handset Speakerphone (CS6219-2)

Get across today!

Since 2005 we have helped organisations and individuals work on there most daunting tasks. We deliver with an expert team of professionals at your beck and call for purposes of writing your first book, business plans and proposals.
Our crew are always eager to make your dream a reality. With an endless steam of professionals pouring in daily to our African writer page at linesfromafrica, we are never short of staff no matter the volume of your work.
Contact us today:
penexusnigeria@gmail.com

WINNING A CONTRACT- The Worth of your Proposals

Printworks Matte White Business Cards 250 Count (00472)Persuasive Business Proposals: Writing to Win More Customers, Clients, and ContractsHandbook For Writing Proposals, Second Edition
Most professionals hate writing in general and proposals in particular which makes it bad because it’s actually very hard to do something well if you hate it. Some of the very best account executives, program managers, engineers, designers and business owners that I have met cringe at the thought of having to put their thoughts on paper.
So they have this brilliant idea that will be a solution to a prospective client, or they actually have all it takes to win an RFP(Request for proposals). What should be next of course is to put their thoughts on paper, and they start to fidget and quickly they start to look out for ways to escape the task the most popular of which is what I call Proposal cloning.
Working as a Content Administrator with the National bureau of statistics, I have seen a lot of cloned proposals. What you as a consultant, do not know is the fact that Cloned proposals (where you tend to grab an electronic copy of somebody else’s proposal, go ahead to change the client’s name to that of the new prospect and then fires it off to the organization that called for an RFP) are the very first we tend to throw out of the pack or are quick to delete out of our inbox.
So you lay back and ask why my proposition is not attended to. Or you sit day after day in your office and expect the phone to ring at anytime with the call for a presentation then ask when they take too long, why haven’t they responded to our proposal?
Another approach is the “Detailed garbage” approach. The author puts together a string of case studies, documentation, product slicks among others in a bid to impress the client and sends it off painting a message that says “whatever you really need out of all these, you can layback and sort it out that is your problem!” Please note, Customers don’t want bulk, they don’t want IRRELEVANT details. And they don’t want to do more work than is necessary to get your drift.

Writing a contract winning proposal could prove to be a lot of work. I see people wince, at the thought of having to put together a lot of details that may even look tiresome. You need to bring your business side plus your psychological insights, your communication skills, and your creativity together in one package.

The value of your proposal is laden in the fact that it is the only means you have of communicating to the highest levels of your client’s organization. It represents your ideas, your product and services, and your company to these people. By creating a powerful tailor-made proposal, you cast a larger shadow. You may be tempted to ask, why do I need all these carefulness when I could easily clone another proposal or get a boilerplate? The gist is, you never know where it’ll end up! Will it be read by the Manager, the CEO, or by a committee of evaluators?
So if you think you are not up to it yourself, why not get another professional to help you out? Because writing a proposal is often the most truly professional thing you do.Anatomy of a Business Plan: The Step-by-Step Guide to Building a Business and Securing Your Company's Future250-cards 2x3.5 White Inkjet Business CardsAvery Printable Two-Side Clean-Edge Business Cards for Laser Printers, White, Pack of 200 (05871)

SELLING YOUR IDEA-How to write an Investor attracting Business Plan!

Writing a Convincing Business Plan (Barron's Business Library)

About five years ago, I was having a nice time with Chuks, a friend of mine that was the head of the Business Development unit of one of the banks in the town. We were just talking when our topic shifted to the drought of knowledge in our communities when it comes to business proposition he lamented at the lack of depth of all business proposals brought to him and confided in me that after reading the executive summary of most Business proposals/plans he discards them. So we eventually had to conclude that the true and real knowledge we need to succeed in life was not taught within the four walls of our Universities.


While I will believe this piece can give you creative insight into the basics of the how, my specific recommendation will be that you employ a consultant to write if it is urgent and after you’ve been writing for a while, you would have mastered how.

DON’T USE YOUR BUSINESS IDEA AS A GUNIEA PIG?

If you believe so much in the Idea you will be ready to give it whatever it takes, to make it happen!

In my years of rendering business consultancy services with various Individuals and organizations across Nigeria on various Proposals I have met with a lot of bright young men and women with big projects and divinely inspired business Ideas which I know could have been well channeled to prosperity if they had a perfect understanding of how to raise venture capital.
Against this backdrop, and many other vicissitudes of life faced by the Nigerian’s creative mind have I decide to package this write up.

(Permit me to inform you that we are working on partnership with one of the world’s best business development experts and will soon sign a deal with another of our Nigerian Consultant just to bring a proper training to you on Business Development and raising venture capital. Details out soon)

I shall also be providing you with a solid prototype/sample Business plan. Packaged by our International partner (Of course for a token) to kick start making your Idea work.

You have a creative business Idea SO WHAT?

Let me shock you by saying, that no one is tripped at the fact that you have a business Idea!
What the Investor wants to see are;
• Is it realistic?
There is nothing wrong in building castles in the air so long as you can put pillars under it! How real and earthly can you get with your business plan?
• What is the ROI?
The most popular radio station the world over is WIII FM- What is in it for me! Understand that everyone and not just you want’s to know the something that they stand to gain, how they will get it, and for how long they’ll keep getting it.
• How simple is it?
Contrary to popular belief, your business proposal should be simple enough to understand. It should be such that without you being there anyone can understand it?
Only one out of every business proposal submitted gets reviewed.

Permit me however to congratulate you; On What? On the fact that you can think and generate business Ideas I belief that is the foundation but remember in the midst of many counselors there is safety.
© 2010
Ajibade OluwaseunAnatomy of a Business Plan: The Step-by-Step Guide to Building a Business and Securing Your Company's FutureSuccessful Business Plan: Secrets & Strategies (Successful Business Plan Secrets and Strategies)Business Plans Kit For Dummies (For Dummies (Business & Personal Finance))

Let me hold your hands.

Today as I sit to write this piece to launch this blog, I did it with you at the back of my mind. I know that there is nothing called impossible in the dictionary of achievers and that is the reason I came along to tell you from this page that no matter the odds, no matter the challenges that life as thrown at or is throwing at you, you have the edge. Don't cover in, never give up. it is usually the darkest before the day breaks. You are just a miracle away. My public engagements including trainings in proposal and business development, I have discovered that there is one thing that is common to all the attendees of my conferences and that is the fact that they all have questions. Questions the world has slammed them in the face. Questions that make them feel that there dreams are just a figment of their imaginations and in all they cover down and back out.
What will you do If I tell you that just tomorrow you will make them come from the doldrums of forgetfulness into reality?
Think about that!
...and while you do, let me hold your hands as we together develop the best business you have ever dreamt of..

IT IS POSSIBLE!!!