speech writing, presentation development and proposal preparation

​​Speech Writing Services

Speeches are highly personal. As a business executive, only you can deliver a speech that sounds like you—one that captures your unique vision, cadence, sense of life and business, and distinct point of view. Speeches are also an art. And when it comes to crafting a speech, line by line, topic by topic, there’s a reason many executives prefer to work with a professional speechwriter—not only does it save time, it helps gives you and your speech a little extra panache.

AaronRichards offers an elite speechwriting service for senior corporate executives. Our top-flight speechwriters have extensive speechwriting and presentation experience. We can help you craft speeches that are memorable, powerful, and, most of all, authentic. (And, by the by, we’re pretty funny too.)

And, rest assured, while we work with you to develop that eloquent expression of your executive expertise, we ensure complete confidentiality on all sensitive materials and communications.

Putting words in another person’s mouth is always risky business, but speechwriters do it all the time. The principal task of the speechwriter is not to produce soaring rhetoric, but rather to express the speaker’s personality, passions and perspectives in his or her own voice.

"Finding the voice" requires the speechwriter to learn how the speaker thinks, reasons, and builds and expresses an argument. Equally important is understanding the audience—their concerns and expectations—to build a speech that matches their needs with the messages the speaker wishes to impart. Our speechwriting services include:


  • Customized speeches tailored to the individual, company and issue
  • Building speeches from strategic narratives
  • Capturing the voice of the individual
  • Rapid turnaround
  • Award-winning writers
  • Collaborative and iterative development
  • Speeches for a specific event, or multiple-speech strategic cycles/campaigns
  • Delivery coaching


 Presentation Development Services

You write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others what’s burning inside you, and we edit to let the fire show through the smoke. 

When creating a presentation, you may end up wondering if your original central message has been obscured instead of illuminated by your slides. AaronRichards can help you create your presentation content from scratch, with a focus on developing the main message, the story arc, and the content needed to flesh out the presentation. Or, if you already have content for your presentation, we can review, edit and enhance it to prepare content for visualization.

Both types of content services follow the same general principles that underlie our unique methodology, which applies storytelling and visual thinking principles to communications designed to shift audience beliefs and behaviors.

The following outlines some principles we apply in a content consulting engagement.

  • Know Your Presentation Audience - Your audience is comprised of individuals with unique desires, fears, and worries. Find out what those are for your audience members so you can create a personal connection and a presentation that makes an impact on each one of them.
  • Your Presentation’s Story- You cannot persuade with facts alone. This idea can be traced back to Aristotle, but advertisers have been putting it to use for decades. Stories offer presenters a great way to evoke emotional responses in their audience and get them to understand your point-of-view.
  • Clear Presentations - Your slides are visual aids, not your script, teleprompter or the star of the show. Many presenters are often tempted to put too much information on a slide. But using your slides as a crutch keeps you from having to deeply understand the subject and your audience, which, above all else, will increase the chances of your presentation resonating.
  • Key Insights
    • Reveal information through an engaging and clear story Story provides balance and structure to your message and allows you to empower your audience to truly make it their own.
    • Address the needs, concerns, and desires of the audience Your audience is the hero, the agent for making your vision a reality. Know where they’re coming from and understand why they might object to your ideas at first.
    • Presentation Slides contain essential details needed for understanding and delivery Make sure every slide supports your Big Idea and that you don’t overload your presentation. Consider including nonessential information in a follow-up email or handout instead.


Proposal Preparation and Management Services

Even large and successful consulting organizations can find it a struggle in today’s world to have on hand the ready capacity of people and resources for timely response to proposal opportunities. Managing resource utilization with business development efforts, maintaining profitability, and getting the best thinking and involvement of the right people is a balancing act that we all know only too well.  Tipping this balance in your favor is where AaronRichards Proposal Writing and Management Services can help. AaronRichards helps busy and successful organizations prepare winning proposals

We have deep experience in developing proposals for full-service management consulting firms. They are successful, busy and very often face the proposal dilemma of “everyone we need to write this is already assigned.” 

Developing a winning strategy and approach, capturing the best your organization has to offer, garnering the best thinking of your most busy people, and putting it all in a proposal that communicates your proposed solutions and collective strength in one, clear, persuasive voice is at the heart of what we do.  Your best people stay busy serving clients, we get their valued and needed input, the proposal gets done with a minimum of organizational strain, and you are better set to focus your team’s attention on preparing for oral presentations and the next phases of the win process.

We help by providing the extra, hands-on resources needed to drive the proposal effort, setting a win strategy that has collective, senior management support, getting input from all the right people, and ensuring a complete response to even the most arcane or complex bidding requirements. Our people know this business very well, have all delivered multi-million dollar projects, understand the inherent risks and complexities of large-scale consulting work, and know how to add this perspective and experience to your team’s efforts without organizational strain. 

During proposal development AaronRichards can provide:

  • Proposal coordination, management and on-time completion - Working with the leadership of your selected team, we help guide the development and completion of a proposal response that speaks in a common voice, communicates your win themes, and ensures that all RFP requirements are addressed and answered with consistency and completeness.  We also review and make sure that resumes are in a consistent format and that qualifications relevant to the experience demanded by the RFP are prominent.   We pay strict attention to even the most arcane proposal legal, documentation, timing, and other prescriptions and work to make sure they are addressed.
  • Opportunity analysis and strategy development - Working with your management team we help assess the competition, identify and agree on those things that differentiate you from the rest, develop and establish a set of points that embody your “win” strategy and communicate that consistently and persuasively throughout your proposal.
  • Executive Summary - We prepare an Executive Summary that speaks directly to the reviewers, recognizing that oftentimes this may be the only part of a massive proposal read by busy, key client executives.  We are especially adept at developing conversational executive summaries that provide not only the requisite summaries of key proposal points but also persuasively make the case for your selection.  Our executive summaries help make your proposal stand out and grab the attention of important decision makers.


Project planning, risk management and budget reconciliation are and important aspect of our proposal preparation services. Large, complex proposals usually require accompanying work plans at exacting levels of task and detail.  We can provide resources with extraordinary skills in developing such complicated project plans, tying these plans to generally described work efforts, and ensuring that the numbers and tables for all work effort and budgets are presented accurately.  Working with your finance, legal and risk management teams, we can also assist in the reconciliation of project activities with identified risks and the project budget to make sure that the proposal fits your profitability models.  Representative indicators could include:

  • Is there sufficient time allocated to perform each task on the project plan?
  • Do the assigned resources have the relevant skills and experience?
  • Are milestone/deliverables payments specified? If so, are the conditions for sign off designated?  
  • Was the deliverable/milestone signoff condition specified clearly in the terms and conditions?  
  • Does the cash flow projection reflect the milestone/deliverable sign off dates in the project plan?
  • What about other costs; such as LTA (long team assignment), contingency, and subcontractors?
  • Have the cost for potential project risks been planned as part of the cost in the project budget?


Resolution of potential project risks are critical to successful proposal development.  Legal departments typically handle contractual terms and conditions. But we also understand that many of these considerations transcend the legal language and become business decisions in terms of balancing risk with performance on the contract.  We can provide supplemental legal assistance and, additionally, work with you to develop project-specific risk management strategies to satisfy legal concerns and to enhance the ability of teams to perform in accordance with proposed contract terms. Our team has negotiated many contracts and is skilled in helping your legal team in the identification of contractual ambiguities, payment considerations, and other matters that should be identified and attended to early in the proposal process. 

Post-proposal support is an important service provided by AaronRichards. Lengthy proposal processes are usually the norm for large procurements.   While the proposal demands your best efforts and thinking, the next phases of selection activities are equally important and sometime even more demanding.  We stand ready to assist in responding to follow-up clarification questions, short-list activities such as preparation of scenarios, and preparing for oral presentations.  We provide specialized oral presentation preparation and coaching of team members.  More specifically, we can provide the following: 
 

  • Comprehensive follow-up assistance - We can coordinate and respond to follow-up RFP questions and all requests for additional information, clarification, or special exercises.  Working with your team, we coordinate and develop the responses as drafted by your SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) and other technical and management staff.
  • Materials preparation and coaching - Developing presentation materials for use at orals and other post-proposal communication needs the same care, planning, and strategy as went into the proposal.  Working with the proposed team, we help you develop the context and the content for the oral presentation, reflecting the same themes as communicated in the proposal.  We can assist in coaching and preparing your proposed team for the Oral presentation.  Working with your proposed team, we help them articulate and rehearse their respective messages.