Frequently asked questions

It depends on the service. Bid review and support is a fixed fee, agreed with you before we start.

Full bid management is a split fee. We agree a fixed fee with you. You pay 50% before any work starts and the other 50% only if you win.

Monthly bid cycles run on a fixed monthly retainer. Each bid you go for then has its own split fee, the same as full bid management.

We quote each fee after a call and a look at the tender documents, based on the contract and how much work the bid involves.

The bid is about your business, so a lot of what goes into it has to come from you. If you've bid before, you can share your previous submissions, certificates and policies through SharePoint or whatever you use. If you're newer to bidding, send what you have and we'll help you build up the rest.

For anything we still need, we come to you. That might be a phone call, a video call or a questionnaire. We can speak to you, your bid team or whoever in your business knows the answer, and we fit it around your diary.

Preparation makes a big difference. Tender deadlines are almost always fixed, so we always try to start as early as possible. The sooner we have what we need from you, the more time we have for every part of the bid.

Before any work starts, we give you a bid or no-bid recommendation. When we take a bid on, it's because we're convinced you can win it. From there, we work on it together. We put the work in from our side, and we need the same from yours.

Capture is the work you do before a tender is published to position yourself to win it. It means getting to know the buyer and what they need, and making sure they know who you are before the tender comes out.

It matters because much of what wins a contract happens before the tender is published. Once it's out, contact with the buyer is usually limited to formal clarification questions, and you're working to a fixed deadline.

Capture is a big focus of our monthly bid cycles. We build a pipeline of the contracts you're targeting and flag pre-market engagement and meet the buyer events early. We also help you build relationships with the buyers behind those contracts, so when a tender is published, you already have a clear idea of your response.

We work alongside your team. Even a strong bid team can only take on so many bids at once, and we can take on the ones they don't have capacity for. We can also help with bids they're already working on.

How much we take on is up to you. It can be anything from a final review or help with a few parts of a bid, through to running the whole thing with full bid management, whatever fits your business.

Whatever we take on, we write it as your business. If you've bid and won before, you'll already have a house style, and we carry it across. We start by learning how your business works and going through your previous bids, so what we write sits alongside your team's work without standing out. The buyer reads one bid from one business.

You work directly with Vlad or Tristan, and often both. From the kickoff meeting to the day your bid goes in, you'll have our mobile numbers.

When you're bidding, you need people who respond quickly. While your bid is live, you can reach us seven days a week, and if a deadline comes down to the wire, we work weekends to get it in.

One of the risks of using someone external is a bid that doesn't sound like it came from your business. So before we write anything, we spend time researching your business. If you've bid before, we go through your previous submissions too. Every response is then written in your voice.

We automate the boring parts of a bid, like building a checklist of every requirement and cross-referencing it against your submission. That leaves more of our time for the quality of your responses and the submission itself. It also keeps our fees down!

We're Vlad Lewis and Tristan Walker, Evia's founders. We studied economics together at college, which is how we first got into procurement. We decided we wanted to help businesses win more public sector contracts, and to bring a fresher perspective to what's quite a traditional industry.

Since then, we've done countless hours of bid writing training and spent months on our own research.

We're sector-agnostic, and we've written and submitted bids across a wide range of industries, for all kinds of businesses. What we pick up in one sector carries into the next.

We've built our own system, and that's where we work on every bid. Your documents and information stay in one secure place, set up and run by us.

We've also built a tool that monitors the procurement portals, and another that flags new opportunities that suit each client. Together, they check the portals every day for new tenders, frameworks and DPSs our monthly clients could go for.

We use AI to help us work faster, from building a checklist of every requirement to producing first drafts. Every quality response is then worked through by us and shaped around your business and what the buyer is scoring. Nothing goes in until you've approved it.

All of it happens inside our own bid writing system, which is hosted in the EU. Your documents and information are stored there, and they're never used to train AI models. We also sign a mutual NDA with you, covering every bid we work on together. We're registered with the Information Commissioner's Office too.