Worth pursuing?
An honest assessment of whether to bid, before you commit time and money: can you win it, and is it worth winning? Teams close to an opportunity find that call hard to make — an external view is often what makes it sound.
Independent bid and capture adviser
Win the right work.
I help organisations bidding for government and other donor-funded contracts decide which opportunities are worth the investment — and turn complex requirements into clear, convincing bids.
FCDO & other UK government procurement · EU-funded commercial tenders · UN agency calls
Where bids are won and lost
ApproachRead the brief
I work out what the client is actually asking for and how they will score the answers — not what the document appears to say. The response can then answer the question being marked.
Shape the response
I structure the bid, sharpen the case for choosing you, and review drafts the way the client’s evaluators will read them — with a distance a team rarely has on its own work.
Selected experience
ExperienceRepresentative examples from past and current assignments, anonymised for confidentiality. Client names and contract values are withheld.
UK stabilisation contract
- Situation
- A commercial implementer pursuing a UK stabilisation contract.
- My role
- Arranged key client meetings, led consortium building, and managed proposal drafting.
- Outcome
- Contract secured.
Ukraine stabilisation tender
- Situation
- A development contractor in a competitive tender for stabilisation work in Ukraine.
- My role
- Bid writer — drafted the response through to submission.
- Outcome
- Contract secured.
EU-funded commercial tender
- Situation
- An international implementer pursuing an EU-funded commercial opportunity.
- My role
- Lead technical writer for the proposal.
- Status
- In preparation — reviewing background documents ahead of the response.
UNDP bid assessment
- Situation
- A live UNDP bid needing independent challenge before submission.
- My role
- Assessed the response against the formal evaluation criteria.
- Outcome
- A sharper, criteria-aligned submission.
Capture intelligence
- Situation
- An international implementer needing stronger evidence to prioritise its opportunity pipeline.
- My role
- Competitor analysis, programme landscaping, and likely-requirement research.
- Outcome
- A clearer basis for prioritising opportunities and shaping early capture work.
Four ways to engage
Services
For the bid decision — fixed fee · about two weeks
Pre-bid diagnostic
A fixed-fee review of one live opportunity, for teams deciding whether to bid. In about two weeks you get a clear, written recommendation — before serious money is spent on the response.
- Reviewed
- The requirement and its scoring logic, your competitive position, and the shape of a compliant, scoreable response.
- You receive
- A written should-bid recommendation: the reasoning, the key risks, and — if you proceed — the priorities the response must answer.
- Timing
- About two weeks from documents shared.
- Enables
- Bid, decline, or reposition — decided on evidence rather than momentum.
The diagnostic answers the decision to bid. If that decision is already made, the engagements below join a live response at any stage and work to its deadline.
Requirement interpretation & bid strategy
Requirement analysis, scoring-logic interpretation, response architecture, and review against evaluator expectations.
Capture & pursuit support
Advice on whether to bid, how to position, which partners to team up with, and what your strongest case is — before writing starts.
Senior adviser retainer
A senior sounding-board across your pipeline: which opportunities to prioritise, and whether each bid is good enough before it goes out.
About me
Senior judgement, from strategy through to drafting.
I advise on the decision to bid, then help do the work that follows — positioning, response structure, drafting, and review. The same adviser from first read to final submission.
I have worked independently on and off since 2007, drawing on senior leadership experience in international development and human-rights organisations. I work mainly with commercial firms that deliver development programmes — particularly stabilisation and governance work in fragile contexts.
“I help organisations decide what’s worth pursuing — and build bids to maximise their score.”
Contact
Discuss an opportunity.
If you are deciding whether to pursue a tender, or need senior support on a live response, send a brief outline. I will reply with an honest view of whether I can help — and if I am not the right fit, I will say so.
LinkedIn ↗Privacy notice — contact form
Controller and contact. Kim Mulji, United Kingdom. To ask about this notice or exercise your data-protection rights, please use the contact form on this website.
What is collected. The details you enter: name, email address, organisation (optional), and your message. Nothing else is collected by this form.
Purpose and lawful basis. Used solely to read and reply to your enquiry, and to keep the resulting correspondence. Lawful basis: legitimate interests (responding to an enquiry you initiated), UK GDPR Article 6(1)(f).
Recipients. Delivered as an email via the site’s UK-based hosting provider, which processes it as a service provider; received and read only by Kim Mulji. Your details are not sold or shared for marketing.
Retention. Kept as ordinary business correspondence for as long as needed to deal with your enquiry and any engagement that follows, then deleted. You can ask for it to be deleted at any time.
International transfers. Processing takes place in the UK. If a transfer outside the UK ever proves necessary, it will rely on recognised safeguards such as the UK Addendum to the EU Standard Contractual Clauses.
Your rights. You may ask for access to, correction, or erasure of your data, object to or ask for restriction of its use, and request portability. You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office: ico.org.uk.
Cookies and analytics. This site sets no cookies and runs no analytics or tracking.