Betty Manning
About the author
I was talking with a long-term customer recently. She’s someone who has been in the proposal world almost as long as I have. We’ve worn many of the same hats, stood in the same hallways at 2 a.m., and lived through the same deadline chaos. She reminded me of a part of our history that people entering the field today can hardly imagine:
The era before electronic proposal delivery.
Back when delivering printed proposals in binders wasn’t optional, it was the only allowed delivery option and they ran our lives for months at a time.
If you weren’t working in proposal industry in the 80’s, 90s or early 2000s, it’s hard to envision what that looked like. Here’s a glimpse:
When 20–40 Proposals a Week Was “Normal”
If you weren’t working in proposal industry in the 80’s, 90s or early 2000s, it’s hard to envision what that meant. One or two proposals? Manageable. But imagine 20, 30, or even 40 proposals going out in a single week. Each with:
- customer copies
- consulting firm copies
- sales copies
- proposal team copies
- internal compliance copies
That meant eight printers running nonstop for days. Sixty to eighty open binders staged across our “production floor.” Customized printed cover and spine inserts, tabs, customized TOCs, and appendix variations lined up in rows two-deep on every flat surface we could find.
Our “production floor” was our office space, with offices along with walls, and rows of cubicles. Walkways were designed around rows of cubicles, and against every cubicle wall were rows of waist-high file cabinets fitted with formica tops for a perfect assembly line. Anyone who lived through that era knows the smell of new binders and printed paper and the sound of a 3hole punch that’s ready to give up.
Then the FedEx drop-off gauntlet because you were waiting for a signature or a last-minute response to a question and missed the pick-up window.
The Good Friday Marathon: 311 Binders in 30 Hours
But the project I’ll never forget, and the one our entire team was “volunteered” for, is the one that pushed us into a 30hour shift.
It was the State of California Medicare Demonstration Project for 18 counties in California. This was the only proposal I recall we worked on that didn’t have a questionnaire at all. Technically, we shouldn’t have been working on it. But after a month of working on the project, with the deadline rapidly approaaching, the case management team couldn’t meet the deadline alone, so they called the only people who could pull off something this chaotic: the proposal team.
We came in early morning on Good Friday.
We left around noon on Saturday as the delivery truck was pulling up to pick up the proposal for Monday delivery.
Eight to ten of us, still functioning (somehow.)
We assembled everything in the lunchroom because it was the only space big enough. And the number is burned into my memory:
311 four-inch binders, boxed and ready for a truck pickup at 12:00 pm that day. I actually took a photo of the lunch room in the middle of the night with dozens of tables covered with the binders.
If you’re doing the math in your head, yes. It was exactly as overwhelming as it sounds.
Just think about the cost. Not just the hours of pullling the documements from the volumes and volumes of policies and procedure manuals (yes those were also hard copies), copying, then punching holes for the 3 ring binders, assembling with tables of contents, tab dividers, and copies of the material, finally boxing them up. If you recall, back then, even if we finished a proposal a week or two ahead of time to send it by regular mail, delivery time was too unpredictable. Everything was FedEx, UPS, DHL, or Priority Overnight. And because deadlines were “set in stone” most of it was rush delivery. Of course this had to be delivered in a truck. I don’t even recall how many copy paper boxes we filled with these binders.
What About Everyday Proposals? (Example: 100 pages × 5 copies)
Not every submission was a 311 binder nightmare. But even average proposals added up.
Per-Proposal Example (5 hardcopy sets, 100 pages each)
(Custom bulk supplies)
| Item | Low ($) | High ($) |
| Printing (500 pages) | $15.00 | $40.00 |
| Binders + tabs (5 sets, bulk) | $39.40 | $76.00 |
| Materials subtotal | $54.40 | $116.00 |
Multiply that by 20–40 proposals in a week, and you understand why budgets vanished quickly.
The Best Part: We Don’t Live This Way Anymore
Today, most organizations deliver proposals electronically, instantly, securely, and without the FedEx runs dread.
Consider for a moment if those policies and procedures were electronic files and were connected to a proposal automation tool so the person having to gather that information, could simply check boxes in a list and let the system automatically combine them into an electronic binder.
Having that type of capability would have saved our company and east $30,000 in costs for that one proposal.
Teams are shifting time from production chaos to quality and strategy. And the biggest time savings?
- No manual digging through thousands of pages of documents in binders.
- No copies
- No tabs.
- No binders.
- No FedEx at 6:55 p.m.
Digital delivery changed everything.
The following chart is a quick comparison of savings. The writing time per proposal was for 2024 vs 2025. The rest is savings in time and materials to put together a hard copy vs digital RFx
Then vs. Now: A Quick Comparison
| Metric | Then (Hard Copy) | Now (Electronic) |
| Writing time per RFP | 30+ hours | ~25 hours |
| Printing / binders / tabs | Required | Not required |
| Shipping | Daily FedEx; freight for big jobs | Instant electronic delivery |
| Delivery time | Overnight or 2–3 days | Immediate |
| Materials + assembly (avg RFP) | $116.00 | $0 |
Source: The APMP benchmarks report on RFP Writing…
Enter: RocketDocs, Since 1994
Ever since I joined RocketDocs, we have worked hard to make the once difficult era of proposal management as easy as possible. We’ve lived through the same evolution you have: from the days of dot-matrix printers and physical mailrooms to the cloud-based, AI-driven landscape of today.
Throughout our own history of name changes and rebrands, our core mission has remained remarkably consistent: eliminating the manual “grunt work” so proposal teams can focus on the win.
RFP Automation: Comparing the Cost of Hard Copy vs. Electronic Proposals
In 1994, “automation” looked very different. Back then, simply having a centralized database to store pre-approved answers was a revolution. It meant the difference between hunting through a physical filing cabinet for a policy manual and finding it on a local server.
As the industry moved from heavy binders to digital PDFs, RocketDocs moved with it:
- From Physical to Digital Libraries: We transitioned from simple storage to intelligent Content Libraries that handle version control, ensuring the “2026 update” doesn’t get swapped for the “1998 original.”
- From “Assembly Lines” to Seamless Integration: Instead of clearing off lunchroom tables to organize 311 binders, our platform allows teams to “assemble” complex, multi-part responses in a virtual workspace.
- The Rise of the “Instant” Proposal: We recognized early on that the 2 a.m. printer jam was a symptom of a larger problem: wasted time. By automating the repetitive 80% of a proposal, we gave that time back to the experts to polish the remaining 20% that actually wins the deal.
We’ve spent three decades ensuring that no one has to spend their Good Friday (or any other Friday) wondering if the three-hole punch is going to survive the night. We aren’t just selling software; we’re providing the antidote to the “Hard-Copy Horror Story.”
Your Turn: What’s Your Hard Copy Horror Story?
If you’ve been in this field long enough to remember:
- Running eight printers at once
- Running out of tabs at 10 p.m.
- Running to FedEx with five minutes to spare
- Running on caffeine and adrenaline
…I want to hear your story.
Are you still required to deliver hard copies?
What use cases still come up?
What tricks have you learned to streamline the process?
No team is too large or small to get help, and we’ve come a long way from that Good Friday marathon. But I think it’s important to remember what we lived through, because it makes our current tools and efficiencies feel like the gift they are.
And honestly, I’ll never complain about a PDF again.
Ready to see the fastest RFP automation on the market? Schedule a Demo to see RocketDocs in action. | Take our short RFP Efficiency Quiz to see how your RFP process stacks up. | Learn more about RocketDocs
