A few weeks ago we won a significant client that had been talking to a firm with more than fifty years of history.
We did not win on price, and we did not win on headcount. We won because the client understood our proposal and could not understand theirs.
The brief was a portfolio review: which marks were registered, in which classes, which were exposed, and what it would cost to close the gaps. Our answer was a table showing every mark, its status, the risk, and the fee to fix it. The other proposal was a scope of work written in the language of the profession rather than the language of a business.
That is the whole difference. In-house teams and founders are not looking for someone to demonstrate expertise. They are looking for someone who will tell them what is broken, what it costs, and in what order to fix it, so they can take that to a board or a partner and get a decision.
Being small helps here. The person who writes the proposal is the person who does the work and the person who answers the phone when something goes wrong.