Paul Conner

Background

About Paul Conner

Over the years, I have worked in three countries as a writer, editor, researcher, and roofer. Call that last one a guarantee that I’m not afraid of hard work. I draw on my experience in large corporations, small businesses, prestigious universities, and my own home office to help organizations communicate clearly and precisely. I served for two years as Associate Director of a small professional publisher, where I acquired new titles and developed promising ideas into finished manuscripts. Along with a good deal of writing and editing, that role required excellent research skills, the flexibility to manage multiple complex projects at once, and a knack for turning my knowledge into meaningful market analysis. I benefited in these respects from my years as an academic law librarian, and my experience in publishing prepared me well for my next job as a proposal writer. At Pearson Education, I helped write extensive business proposals, some of them earning hundreds of millions of dollars, for the world’s largest education company. I also helped optimize my department’s workflow by creating and maintaining a database of boilerplate text that let us work more efficiently and profitably. By the end of my time at Pearson, we submitted 71% more proposals each year, improved our win rate from 50% to 61%, and increased our annual revenue generation by $113 million, all without adding staff. I was proud each month to submit a report of our activities to our division’s managing director. When Pearson sold my division, my family and I were living in Grand Cayman—my wife had landed a job there, and our children were still in preschool. Unauthorized to work in Cayman and too remote to take a new job with a stateside company, I became a freelance writer and editor. Before long, I built an international clientele, mostly of small business owners. My proudest achievement as a freelancer was a successful letter of nomination for the recipient of a prestigious civil rights award. Two years later, when my wife’s company was sold and her job was eliminated, we returned to the US. My freelance career paid well enough for us to buy a house in a nice Seattle exurb, but my family needed more predictability than freelancing could provide. I now document highly complex commercial acquisitions for Puget Sound Energy, Washington’s largest energy utility. PSE has embraced an ambitious set of renewable-energy goals, and I help inform our leadership's pursuit of the acquisitions that will get us there.