Bid response & grant writing
Most bids lose before anybody reads them.
A form left out. An addendum nobody acknowledged. A dollar figure sitting in the technical volume where it does not belong. Any one of those ends a proposal that took eighty hours to put together, and there is no appeal and no second look.
I read solicitations the way the evaluation committee will read yours, then I tell you plainly where you stand. Small contractors bidding public work. Nonprofits, cities and utility districts going after grants. Flat fees, published on this site, because you should not have to sit through a sales call to find out what something costs.
Two desks, one skill
Pick the door that fits.
Reading a two hundred page solicitation and turning it into a checklist of every obligation is the same job whether the document is an invitation to bid or a notice of funding opportunity. What happens after that is where the two part company, so I keep them separate.
The Bid Desk
Contractors and small firms
You are bidding state, county, city, school district or utility district work and the paperwork is where it hurts. I build the compliance matrix, keep the addenda straight, score your draft the way the committee will, and write the response when you want it written.
- Compliance review before you hit submit
- Shred and an honest bid or no-bid read
- Red team scoring on a draft you wrote
- Full proposal response, flat fee
From $500 for a compliance review to $25,000 for a large full response. Every price is on the page.
See the Bid DeskThe Grant Desk
Nonprofits, cities, counties, districts
Grant deadlines are published a year ahead, which means the work can be planned instead of panicked over. I build the calendar, write the application, and stay on for the reporting and the drawdowns after the award lands.
- Prospect research on funders you can actually win
- Foundation and federal applications
- CDBG and infrastructure applications for local government
- Post-award administration, which is the part nobody wants
From $500 for prospect research to $10,000 for a municipal infrastructure application. Administration priced monthly.
See the Grant DeskThe reason this work exists
Compliance is scored before quality is.
Public procurement is not a beauty contest. Before an evaluator reads a word of your approach, a purchasing officer runs your submission against a responsiveness checklist. Fail any line on it and the package is set aside unopened, no matter how good the work inside would have been.
The things that actually end bids:
- Submitted after the deadline, by any margin
- A required form missing or unsigned
- A notarization left blank
- An addendum never acknowledged
- Price appearing in the technical volume
- Page or format limits exceeded
- A mandatory pre-bid meeting missed
- A minimum qualification not documented
- State or federal registration lapsed
- Bid bond wrong in form or amount
- Files named or packaged against instruction
- References that do not match the stated scope
None of that is about writing. All of it is about somebody reading the document twice, on purpose, with a list.
That is most of what I do, and it is why the smallest thing I sell costs $500 instead of $5,000. You do not have to hand me the whole proposal to get value out of me. Hand me the one you already wrote and let me find what is going to get it thrown out.
Before you call anyone else
What I will not do, and why.
Some of these cost me money. All of them protect you, and a firm that will not tell you where its limits are has not thought about them.
- FEE I will never work for a percentage of what you win. Contingent fees on federal contracts are prohibited under FAR Subpart 3.4, and FAR 52.203-5 lets the government void the contract and take the fee back. You are the one who signs that covenant, so a success fee puts the exposure on you. On the grant side it is unallowable under 2 CFR 200 and an ethics violation besides. Flat fees, always.
- COI I will never take two clients on the same solicitation. Not with a firewall and not with different writers, because by then I have seen somebody's pricing strategy. I ask for the solicitation number before you tell me anything substantive, and I keep a conflict register. If you call second, I will tell you so.
- ADV I will not call a contracting officer or program officer on your behalf. Procedural questions are fine and I will help you frame them. Advocating for an award is where proposal assistance turns into lobbying, and it is not what you hired me for.
- FACT I will not write a past performance reference you have not confirmed. Contract values, dates, agency names, personnel credentials, certifications, licensure. Every one of those comes from you and you attest to it in writing. A wrong number in that section is a misrepresentation to a government entity, and the consequences run all the way to debarment.
- BID I will tell you to skip a bid you cannot win. This county is small and it talks. Two losses attributed to me and I am finished here, so my incentive and yours point the same direction. If the incumbent is strong, the qualifications do not fit, or the scoring rewards something you do not have, I would rather say so and keep the relationship.
Straight answer
The practice is new. Here is what that means for you.
Reelfoot Bid & Grant is a young firm and I am not going to pretend otherwise by putting stock photos of a conference room on this page. What I have is twenty years of running a business in Obion County, a background in healthcare informatics where the whole job was reading dense regulatory documents and turning them into workflows people could follow, and a process that gets a two hundred page solicitation shredded into a compliance matrix in a fraction of the time it takes to do by hand.
What that buys you is a price the national proposal shops cannot touch and my direct attention on your file. What it costs you is a reference list I am still building. So here is the fair trade:
Standing offer
Send me a solicitation you are thinking about, or one you already lost. I will read it and send back a one page honest read on whether it was worth bidding and where the points were. No charge, no obligation, and nothing gets pitched inside it. If the work is any good you will know it, and if it is not you have lost an email.