It goes without saying that Procurement Rounds are a nightmare for you but a real commercial opportunity for us. That said we hope we get the pricing of our support services right and that we genuinely avoid becoming opportunistic. By way of an example we dealt with countless appeals against Family refusals last time round in a frenzied couple of weeks. The majority of these were “generic” ones where the only option was to challenge the scheme as a whole. We made these grounds public and charged everyone, even those for whom we prepared specific appeals, a discretionary £50 fee. One competitor was asking for multiples of that figure on account before even considering if any appeal existed.
If that sounds defensive apologies but we are quite proud of charging what we think is a reasonable price and not treating things like this as a feeding frenzy.
This time round we will be offering one of 2 options to non-retained clients i.e. those who do not employ us on a routine basis.
For those wanting assistance with the entire process we will assist you complete the bid, and guide you through its submission, using the webinar software and a conference phone call. This was really successful last time and can be done in an hour of your choosing.
If you just want to be sure that everything is ok and that you have not made a potentially fatal IT error we can check your bid, before or after submission.
Talking ourselves out of these fees however, there is NO reason why any firm should not be able to achieve at least the former without our assistance. The real issue is one of cost benefit.
Last time we charged £500 for the former and £250 for the latter. This time we think the process will be simpler and anticipate a reduced fee – we do however want to see the detail first. If you want to book a slot now we guarantee that the charges will not exceed last time and Jayne is already filling the diary.
For those planning to do it themselves we plan to do another “Journey Through the E-portal” webinar on Tuesday 6th September, day 2 of the window. We will repeat this on Friday 9th. This will be a direct tour through the operation of the Bravo Solutions software and provide a visual guide on how to navigate through it. This means we cannot record it and you will have to be in attendance. For those planning to do this themselves, and you should, this may well represent a well spent £60.
Sorry that this is so long winded.
