Urgent bid support · situation 9 of 12
You have written it yourself and want it checked before submitting
A review is the cheapest intervention available and the most commonly left too late. Done properly it is not a proofread. It is scoring your draft against the published criteria and the published scoring scale the way an evaluator would, question by question, with a mark and the reason it is not a higher mark. That is actionable. Comments like this reads well are not, and are what most internal reviews produce.
The honest bit
A review two days before submission finds problems nobody can fix. If you have a week we can usually turn findings into marks; if you have a day we can catch compliance failures and little else. Compliance failures alone are worth the exercise, because an unanswered requirement or a breached word limit is fatal regardless of how good the rest is. But do not expect a late review to lift a middling submission into a winning one.
What we need to start today
- The draft as it stands, even if incomplete
- The published evaluation criteria, weightings and scoring scale
- The response templates with their word or character limits
- The specification, so we can check for requirements that never made it into a response
- How much time is genuinely left
When we will tell you not to bid
These are the things that make the situation undeliverable rather than merely tight. If any of them apply we will say so on the first call, before you spend anything.
- Too little time to act on what the review finds, which turns it into a source of anxiety rather than marks
- No access to the published criteria, without which a review is just an opinion
- A draft that is an outline rather than a draft, where the honest answer is that it needs writing rather than reviewing
Questions people ask at this point
What does a bid review actually include?
A mark and a reason per question against the published criteria and scoring scale, a compliance check against every requirement in the pack including ones with no response template, and rewrites of the passages costing you the most marks. It is an evaluation, not a proofread.
Is it worth reviewing a bid the day before submission?
For compliance, yes: an unanswered requirement or a breached word limit is fatal and both are findable in an hour. For scoring, a day rarely leaves time to act on what is found. We will tell you which of those two you are buying.
How much time should I leave for a review?
Enough to act on it, which in practice means with about a third of your available time still remaining, on a complete rough draft rather than a polished partial one.
Tell us the deadline and we will tell you if it is doable
We respond the same day. Send the documents and the deadline and you will get a straight answer on whether it is deliverable, including if the answer is no. A bid you were never going to win costs more than the fee it would have earned.
Send us the deadline
Review before submitting. Tell us the closing date and what you have, and we will come back the same day with whether it is deliverable.
Other situations we pick up
- A tender is due this week and nothing is written
- A private sector RFP has landed with a short deadline
- Your bid writer has dropped out mid-submission
- A framework application closes this week and you have not started
- You need to get onto a Dynamic Purchasing System quickly
- An ITT has arrived and you have no bid team