Tender and Bid Writing Editing and Proofreading Services

Your price is the lowest and you do not win. The reason is on the last page of your submission, where a schedule of qualifications explains that the price excludes working outside normal hours, assumes the site will be free of obstructions, and is subject to a steel price review. Every one of those is reasonable. Together they told the client that your number was not the number, and the bid that won carried the same risks inside its price.

We edit what construction bid teams produce — qualification and assumption schedules, tender clarifications and their responses, method statements and quality submissions, programme narratives submitted with bids, pricing document notes and preliminaries descriptions, exclusion and inclusion statements, risk and opportunity submissions, social value and community benefit responses, health and safety and quality management responses, case studies and past performance evidence, and post-tender negotiation correspondence. Our editors work on the schedule that decides whether your price is comparable.

The qualifications and assumptions schedule is where a competitive bid is either understood or discounted, and its failure is a list that transfers risk without pricing it. A client comparing four bids will normalise them, and a qualification they cannot price becomes an assumed cost added to your number — usually generously. We work through these so each qualification is stated with what it would cost if it turned out to be wrong, since a qualification with a price attached is a priced option and one without is an unknown the client will overestimate; so genuinely standard qualifications are separated from the two or three that matter, because a schedule of thirty items buries the ones the client should actually engage with; so anything you can carry rather than qualify is carried, given that each qualification costs you comparability and some of them are cheaper to price than to explain; so the assumptions are written as questions the client can answer — if the site will be clear by 1 March, this qualification falls away — as this invites a conversation rather than a deduction; so anything that is a genuine deal-breaker is stated as one rather than hidden in a list; and so the schedule is placed where the evaluator will read it rather than as an appendix that arrives with a different tone from the rest of the bid. Schedules written this way let a client compare your price with the others.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including bids, pricing and commercial strategy. We are editors rather than estimators, commercial managers or bid strategists, and we offer no view on pricing, risk or bid decisions. What we can do is make your qualifications cost you less than they currently do.