College of Pension Actuaries

If your company or organisation is producing lots of Tender Documents on a regular basis but doesn’t have a set process in place then the overall efforts might be costing much more than they need to cost. So it is advisable to have a Tender Writing Consultant appraise your current systems and recommend a plan of action to get the most out of your current Tendering activities. If you do decide to hire a Tender Writing Consultant, which is highly recommended, then you should choose one by reputation and make sure that you hire one of the best ones who can really change your company or organisation’s Tender Writing Process.

So what are the most common aspects of Tendering Processes that usually need changing? Well, there are a few common issues with the typical Tender Writing Process and the effects of these deficiencies are usually higher costs than needed and lower results than anticipated. In essence, the first Tender that a company or organisation ever writes themselves or has produced for them should be the most expensive and each subsequent Tender that is written should be less expensive each time. This is because the first Tender requires lots of information to be collated, interpreted and used for the purpose of the Tender. The second Tender does not necessarily need to follow the same process, at least not the aspect of the process which entails information gathering and interpretation. This means that the second Tender must cost less right? It still depends on the type of project that is being Tendered for but if all things were considered equal then gathering information once and reusing it multiple times does definitely helps to cut costs.

As you seek to promote your book or yourself, you may have speaking engagements or interviews. People may call to ask you questions about your work before they book you as a speaker or ask you to be a guest. Whatever you are doing, this is a great opportunity to expand your reach even more by turning whatever you say into articles, blogs, or even a book. Plus, if you are speaking or doing a guest interview, you can videotape or record that – or get a copy of the video or audio recording – and post that on your website, blog, on Facebook, and on other video sharing sites.

A good way to start turning what you say into what you write is to make a transcript of the recording. Then, you can draw on the ideas expressed in that transcript to write an article, blog, or section of a book.

Normally, just transcribing a transcript isn’t enough, because we speak differently than we write. In speaking, you may ramble, have asides, digress to another topic, and add in placeholders like “uhmmm” and “you know”. So you have to organize, edit, and polish up whatever you say. But transcribing what you say is a good starting point, since you have laid out your ideas in your talk or interview.

In creating a transcript, figure on about 4 to 5 hours of typing to produce about 12 to 15 single spaced pages for each hour of speaking. So, a 15 to 20 minute talk or interview might take an hour to an hour and a half to type up, resulting in about 3 to 5 pages of copy. Then, when you reorganize and polish up your transcript, that could result in up to 2 or 3 articles of about 500-700 words – the ideal length for most articles today – depending on what you have said and how well this lends itself to one or a series of articles.