FAQs

No, but we do help maximise your chances of success. Our tips for success include:

• Contact us early – before the process officially starts, if possible.
• Respond quickly when we request information.
• Give us as much information as possible.
• Be available to answer our queries and provide the requested information for the submission.

For our part, we will respond quickly and be available to answer queries when you need us. We will share our knowledge so you have greater skills and confidence going into the next tendering process. We will help you ensure that your bid is as good as it can be.

If you submit bids regularly we offer the option to sign-up to a monthly retainer. This allows you to draw on our bid management and consultancy expertise throughout the year, whenever you need us. This is a cost-effective way of securing our services and ensuring you have access to our team’s expertise whenever you need it.

This is the question we get asked most frequently, and a red herring. We work with all kinds of companies across numerous sectors, so it is likely we will have worked on a bid similar to the one yours. However, we don’t believe this is key to success. We are bid management experts but depend on your subject matter expertise. Collaboration which draws on both areas of expertise – yours and ours – is the key ingredient to any bid’s success. We don’t need to have worked in your sector before to collaborate well with you.

No. We are providing a bid writing and management service, not guaranteeing we will win the tender or funding award for you. What we can guarantee is that we will present your company in the best possible light according to the tender criteria. What we can’t guarantee is the competition you are up against. If there are other tenders submitted by companies that more closely match the tender requirements that are equally well written and presented, this will affect your chance of winning and is not something we can control.

We don’t offer fixed rates. The cost of any submission will depend on the size and complexity of the tender document or funding application and how much support you would like from us. Therefore, we ask you to send the documentation to us so one of our experienced bid managers can review it. Once we’ve reviewed the documentation, we’ll be able to provide a no-obligation quote based exactly on your requirements.

Some firms advertise win rates in the nineties on their website. We believe these figures to be misleading. To provide an accurate win rate would require constant re-evaluation, with information being updated daily. We therefore do not publish our win rate. The majority of the bids we work on are successful, but we don’t offer any guarantees. Sometimes clients will contact us and ask us to work with them on a highly speculative bid. If we feel that there are serious gaps we will highlight these and be honest about the chances of success. However, we have had clients who have accepted this advice but requested that we work with them on a speculative bid anyway. We do occasionally succeed in helping our clients win such a bid, though inevitably including such bids when calculating win rates would make figures in the high nineties completely unrealistic.

Absolutely not. Confidentiality and professionalism are paramount. Once we have agreed to represent you we have a duty to inform any new clients that we are already working on a bid for that particular tender and refuse to accept their commission.