Frequently Asked Questions

When you choose us, we provide a personal, trusted service. We get to the heart of your operations and form an integrated, winning team. We then build on that relationship to continue learning about your business to identify new opportunities together and win those critical business-growth contracts.  

We will always get involved with your company on a personal basis with the view of building long-term relationships. Integrating with your organisation and becoming a valued member of your team is important to us. Most of our work is carried out remotely, however, we do also attend face-to-face meetings when required. We are very accustomed to working via video meeting platforms such as MSTeams or Zoom and find this to be a very efficient way of working. Our ethos is collaborative, but our way of working remains outside of IR35. You contact us on a project basis, with any member of the team able to carry out the work.

Yes of course – Pipster love to work collaboratively and will support you with any element of bidding. If you want to write, we can support with structuring response templates  to make sure you answer all elements of each question and receive the highest score and then follow this up with a content review to make any suggestions to elevate your scores. We can review on a content basis or content plus formatting to ensure that your bid is compliant.  

There are a lot of variables to produce a winning bid so we cannot guarantee this. In becoming a part of your team we will generate submissions collaboratively in a mutual endeavour – you are a big part of winning the bid! We will not get involved in pricing – this is normally dealt with by clients or by external estimators, although we will upload or integrate pricing into the submission should you wish us to. Submissions are scored on both price and quality, so we are only responsible for producing a proportion of the bid, which is why we cannot totally guarantee to produce a winning bid for you.

Yes, we do. We are very happy to review submissions to make sure that they are compliant and hitting the evaluation criteria. This service includes a careful review of the client’s documents, your written quality responses, and a list of improvements that could be made (if necessary!). We also look at bids that have been lost to try and help you to understand where quality improvements can be made for the next submission. If you are happy with the content of your submission, we also offer a proofreading service where we will perform a ‘sense check’ which includes focusing on consistency of content, spelling, grammar, punctuation and formatting. 

Firstly, we recommend contacting us via info@pipster-solutions.co.uk or our Contact Form where one of the team will get back to you to discuss your requirements. We provide the first one-hour consultation free of charge for all new clients. Should you decide to work with us, we will begin work on your project. We normally arrange a ‘Kick-Off Meeting’ either in person or via a virtual meeting platform such as MSTeams or Zoom where we will analyse the tender specification with you and establish what is needed. We will then work with you to acquire documentation such as CVs, company policies, procedures, method statements, risk assessments and case studies. If any of these documents need to be re-designed during the process, we will work with you to align these with the procuring organisation’s requirements. We will then liaise with you, your operational team and/or your subject matter experts to produce compelling technical responses for the submission.

If you have hired us to review, then yes! If you want us for the end-to-end process, this usually includes a full review of the submission. If you have written the submission internally and want someone to perform a final review of it, we offer this as a service. 

How long is a piece of string?! It really depends on factors such as the requirements of the bid, what we are contracted to do, how well we know the client, how long the questions are and how quickly requested information gets sent to us. The earlier we work with you, the better idea we will have of how long the bid will take to complete. We are happy to provide you with a timescale estimation at the point of quotation, although this can be subject to change.

We charge a day rate for the time spent working with you. This is discussed on a client-by-client or project-by-project basis and a guide price is always provided before we start work. Fees are based on an initial estimation of how much work will be involved. There are many variables that we consider when providing you with a quotation. These include the amount of information you already have on file from marketing literature and previous tender submissions, the size of the submission, formatting, graphics required and timescales. We remain transparent about time and cost throughout the process to ensure you are aware of any variances. We do not offer a ‘no win no fee’ guarantee as it is impossible to control all the variables of a tender.

We work on a first-come, first-served basis, and will never create a conflict of interest by working on the same bid for different companies.

Pipster Solutions is highly regarded in the highways and civil engineering sectors due to Pippa’s long standing experience, comprehensive understanding, and outstanding reputation in these areas. Our team of writers also have knowledge across various industry sectors. Bidding skills transfer across all industries including highways, civil engineering, utilities, construction, nuclear, facilities management, energy, security, forensics, custody, and training. The list is endless!

The number one thing we will need from you is your commitment. So that we can do a great job for you, we will need you to commit your time to a kick off meeting, subject matter expert interviews, key stage reviews and we require you to submit any content to us by required deadlines. This will mean that we will have the information required for us to produce a compelling, persuasive, and outstanding piece of work. Our team will work transparently with you throughout each bid process on progress, sharing content securely online to collaborate and ultimately work as one team. We just need open communication, your dedicated time and we will do the rest.  

Put simply, Pipster clients win the work they want. When you choose us, we provide a personal, trusted service. We get to the heart of your operations and form an integrated, winning team.