For contractors and small firms
The Bid Desk
State, county, city, school district and utility district work. You know how to do the job. The document is what keeps costing you.
A contractor bidding a million dollar county job has two weeks, a crew to run in the meantime, and a stack of paperwork where one clerical mistake throws the whole thing out unread. That is not a writing problem. It is a reading problem, and reading carefully is a thing you can hire out.
I work on flat fees and I publish them below. Nobody else in this business does, and there is a reason for that: their hourly consultants cannot profitably staff a $2,500 bid. Mine can, because the tedious half of the job runs on a process instead of on billable hours.
Where I am useful, in the order it usually comes up
- You are looking at a solicitation and not sure it is worth the effort. The shred pulls out every obligation in the document with a requirement number and a page cite, then I give you a straight bid or no-bid read. Sometimes that read is no, and that is the cheapest advice you will get all year.
- You have a draft and you want somebody to try to break it. I score it against the agency's own published evaluation criteria, the same form the committee will use, and hand back a prioritized list of what to fix first. This is where the points are, and it is the best value on the page.
- You are about to submit and want a second set of eyes on the package. Forms, signatures, notarizations, addenda, page limits, file naming, price separation. Pass or fail against every mandatory line, with a fix list, inside two days.
- You want the whole thing written. Flat fee, roughly one to three percent of the first year contract value. The shred and the compliance check are built into it because you cannot write a responsive proposal without doing both.
- You bid enough that you want somebody watching the calendar year round. Monthly capture advisory with named deliverables and a set number of proposals per quarter.
Published, because you asked
What it costs.
Ranges reflect the size of the solicitation and how tight the clock is. You get a fixed number in writing before any work starts, and it does not move unless the scope does.
| Service | Fee |
|---|---|
| Compliance-Only Review Your finished package checked against every mandatory requirement in the solicitation. Forms, signatures, notarizations, addendum acknowledgments, page and format limits, file naming, separation of price from the technical volume. You get a pass or fail on each line and a fix list ordered by what will disqualify you first. | $500 – $1,20024 – 48 hours |
| Shred + Bid / No-Bid Brief Every obligation in the document extracted with a requirement ID, source section and page. A proposal outline built in the order the agency's own instructions and scoring criteria run. Plus an honest read on whether this one is winnable for you, including what the incumbent looks like where that is on the record. | $750 – $1,50048 – 72 hours |
| Red Team Review Best place to start Your draft scored exactly the way the evaluation committee will score it, against their published criteria, by somebody who did not write it. Comes back with the score, the gaps, and rewrite instructions ranked by points recoverable per hour of your time. If you already write your own proposals and just want them to stop losing by four points, this is the one. | $1,500 – $4,0003 – 5 days |
| Full Proposal Response The complete response written and assembled, shred and final compliance check included. Flat fee set at roughly one to three percent of the first year contract value, agreed before we start. You supply and attest to every fact about your company; I supply the structure, the coverage and the prose. | $2,500 – $25,0002 – 4 weeks |
| Opportunity Map Twelve months ahead, on paper. Every solicitation you are licensed and qualified to bid across your counties, which contracts recur and when the current ones run out, who holds them now and at what price where that is public, and the specific gaps between your file and the mandatory qualifications that keep showing up. | $1,500 – $3,0001 – 2 weeks |
| Bid Desk Retainer Monthly capture advisory with named deliverables: bid and no-bid memos, qualification gap analysis, bonding and insurance readiness, incumbent and prior price briefs, and a set number of full proposals per quarter written into the agreement. Not a feed of opportunities you could pull yourself. Judgment about which ones deserve your week. | $1,500 – $5,000per month |
Terms, in plain words
How the money works.
- 01 A small job credits against a big one. Buy a shred at $1,000 and then decide you want the full response on that same solicitation inside the bid window, and the $1,000 comes off. You pay $5,000, not $6,000. That makes the small engagement a risk free way to find out whether you want to work with me, which is the whole point of it existing. The credit applies to that solicitation, not to the next one.
- 02 The bookends run cheaper together. A shred on day one and a compliance review on day twenty-seven use the same matrix, so buying the pair up front costs less than buying them apart. Ask for it and I will quote it that way.
- 03 I will not red team my own writing, and you should not let me. A red team is an independent reviewer scoring work they did not touch. If I wrote your proposal, what I can honestly give you is a careful self-review, and calling that a red team would be a lie you would eventually catch. If the stakes are high enough to want a real one, hire somebody else for it. I will say that out loud every time.
- 04 Half up front, half on submission. No exceptions, and it is not personal. This industry has a collection problem because clients who lose do not want to pay, and a firm that lets that slide stops being able to take small jobs. One round of revisions is included and the agreement spells out what a round is. Anything under ten business days carries a rush surcharge of twenty-five to fifty percent, because half of this work arrives late and panicked and I would rather price that honestly than resent it.
One honest caveat
A lot of Tennessee local work is low bid, and narrative will not save you there.
Under the Municipal Purchasing Act, Tennessee cities have historically competitively bid rather than solicited proposals, and requests for proposals have been largely reserved for licensed professionals such as architects, engineers and attorneys. That is loosening, and the sealed bid threshold moved from $10,000 to $25,000, but plenty of local solicitations are still invitations to bid where price alone decides.
On those, no amount of writing moves the outcome. What still applies is the responsiveness check, because a low bidder gets thrown out for a missing bond or an unacknowledged addendum exactly as fast as anybody else, and that failure mode is the most common one there is. So on a low bid job, buy the compliance review and skip the rest. I will tell you that instead of selling you a proposal you do not need.
Where scored proposals actually live around here is state level solicitations, the larger counties and metros, school districts, and utility and special districts. That is where the writing earns its fee, and it is where I would point you first.