Our Story - The History and People Behind Proposal Kit /

In 1999, the name Proposal Kit was decided on because it perfectly described the product: a content kit for writing a proposal. Initially, only ten documents were explicitly targeted at website developers. The ProposalKit.com domain was registered in 1999. Proposal Kit became website developers' first proposal and legal contract template product.

A few years later, Ian expanded the website development business to create rich multimedia presentations on business-card-sized CD-ROMs, becoming a new marketing fad. His expertise in software development, photography, website development, and graphic design was a perfect combination.

For these new business endeavors, more legal contracts and proposals had to be created for graphic design projects, CD-ROM development and duplication projects, Flash multimedia, etc. All this new content was rolled into the Proposal Kit product, and the market for Proposal Kit grew.

Key individuals like Tom Granger entered the CD-ROM development business during this time. Over time, Tom's company branched into website hosting and other web and software design specialties. Much of the proposal and contract material created by Tom's company has been acquired for use in Proposal Kit, expanding Proposal Kit into more IT specialties over the years.

Over time, as templates grew, we needed a software interface to help manage and customize them. The Proposal Pack Wizard software interface was created in 2003 when Microsoft released Word 2003 with the macro-support features our interface needed.

Ian also created a stock photography website and was a professional event photographer. His work included being the official photographer for Seattle's Seafair event.

All of the proposals and contracts for photography from stock photo sales, model releases, copyrights, etc., created for that part of the business were rolled into the Proposal Kit as the Photography/Media Contract Pack.

We kept hearing from Proposal Kit customers about how they used the package for proposal writing situations we had yet to design it for outside the realm of Information Technology companies. We embraced this variety and continually expanded the content in the Proposal Kit to cover more types of proposal writing and more business situations and industries.

We started working with Pamela Beason, a managing editor at Microsoft. Pam has written many of the stock Proposal Pack templates and Sample Proposals and has proofread most of our content over the years since then.

In 2007, we heard from a long-time customer, Dr. Allison Jackson, who had used Proposal Kit since 2003 to write complex multi-million dollar government grant RFP responses. We hired Dr. Allison to create the government grant and RFP response content, samples, and manuals that are now part of the Proposal Kit.

In 2009, we rebranded with a new logo and website design.

The logo represents overlapped pages with content blocks, which is how the Proposal Kit system is designed to work.

As the amount of content grew, we divided that content into different products. The Proposal Kit Professional bundle was the original Proposal Kit. We accumulated so many legal contracts that they were split into six different Contract Packs.

As time passed, more small businesses and people without design skills were using the Proposal Packs, and more help was needed to customize the visual design of their documents. We started adding visual design options that became our Title Page Packs, Proposal Pack design themes, and the software features in our Wizard for creating custom visual design themes.

Jennifer Ward was responsible during this time for creating hundreds of Proposal Pack logo design themes.

Many materials we created or acquired over the years have not always fit neatly into the proposal or contract writing categories; however, it is well-suited as additional material that can be used to manage various kinds of projects after a proposal has been accepted and that project has been started. We bundled this extra material into our Professional package as the Project Management Pack. Recognizing that many companies need to manage large amounts of data, we worked with a records management specialist to create an extensive collection of proposal and project management content specifically for larger-scale records management projects. The Records Management Toolkit is a subset of this material made for us by Leigh Woody.

With the increasing use of mobile devices, it was time to redesign the Proposal Kit website completely. In late 2015, we rebuilt our entire website, replacing it with a responsive, mobile-friendly design created by UX designer Alexander Musgrave.

We rolled out our 20th edition of Proposal Kit Professional. We also overhauled our hundreds of products with a new design and interfaces matching our recent website redesign.

Our entire line of hundreds of products encompassing three-quarters of a million documents was upgraded this year to bring all our document formats and software up to the most current versions of Word.

One of the most extensive features ever added was released at the end of 2023. A full-featured customizable line-item database system was added to the Proposal Pack Wizard. This system automates line-item quotes, schedules, and all other business plan financial pages.

While many proposal template and software programs have cropped up over the years since we started, most of them have faded away.

Proposal Kit grows yearly, driven by what we hear from people like you. We continually add new proposal and contract content, samples, articles, graphic design themes, and software features for every type of business and industry.

When we started, we pledged to keep our products modestly priced and available to everyone, including individuals and small businesses, and we continue to do so today. Our products are in the same price range as a decade ago, even though they now include material that has grown by several orders of magnitude.

We have heard from so many of you over the years that we have collected over 800 testimonials and reviews about how our Proposal Kits have helped you solve many problems, saved time and money, and helped you collectively close hundreds of millions of dollars in deals.

Scores of other people over more than two decades have contributed to the unique content in Proposal Kit, including attorneys and solicitors in many countries, professional business proposal writers, authors, graphic designers, photographers, clients, and software developers. Their combined efforts of over 25 years are contained in our Proposal Kit products.