I help businesses write content that achieves a persuasive goal. Winning business, winning support, winning arguments.

A lot of my time is spent with bid teams, working on proposals. But I also work with marketers, engineers, product managers, customer success teams and consultants to help them get their message across.

I’ve captured a lot of my tips and techniques in my book, Persuasive Writing. It’s designed for business people who need to write persuasively, but were never taught how.

Storyboardr’s my brand for all things writing.

Bid and proposal support

I work with clients and their bid teams to create clear, concise and compelling responses to formal tenders and other forms of proposal. Through a combination of training and coaching, I’ll help your teams improve the quality of their writing so your key messages shine through. I run mock bids to help teams prepare for major pursuits, and can act on the assurance side to provide targeted, usable feedback to help you improve your draft responses.

I focus my efforts on ‘getting to good’: the critical point in any bid or proposal process where the draft response is good enough for review. Too often, this happens at the end of the schedule. Get to good earlier, and the feedback from your reviewers will be more valuable because it will tell how to get to great.

Bid process and organisation

I’ve worked in and run bid teams in different organisations. There are different ways to do things, but some of the fundamentals remain the same. I’ll help you set up a business-winning proposal function for your organisation, drawing on the best practices from the likes of APMP and the Shipley method, as well as a long career learning what works, and what doesn’t.

Creating an efficient bid engine room gives you more time and capacity to focus on your positioning in the market, quality of your content, and the impact of your messages.

AI and bidding

AI tools are powerful content creation tools. But that’s only half the challenge - a fantastic response is pointless if it’s the wrong solution to the wrong problem. Used as part of your business winning and bidding workflow, AI is a game-changer, unleashing incredible productivity improvements and banishing for ever the last minute rush to trim words, squeeze in credentials and maximise points-scoring content.

I’m delighted to be the business change partner of TenderNinja, an AI bid-writing workbench for UK public sector bids designed by people that know bidding inside out. Driven by your knowledge base, it creates high quality responses in seconds which you can review and quickly re-generate to get to great faster than you ever could through traditional methods. Word count adjustments and score evaluation tools help you stay compliant and achieve the top marks.

Business writing

Good business writing is a sign of clear thinking, and for that reason alone it’s a worthwhile skill. I work with all kinds of people and teams, usually in small groups or 1:1 to help them develop the skills and practices that transform humdrum writing into a powerful and persuasive business tool.

I’m a strong advocate of AI, and I’ll help you understand how AI tools can boost your creativity and productivity. But it’s also important to know when to take back control as a human, and make sure your content expresses what you want, how you want.

Based on what you want to achieve, I can tailor a programme ranging from a single ‘masterclass’ session through to a set of working sessions which allow delegates to try out new skills and get feedback.

Use cases include:

  • Grant applications

  • Business emails

  • Sales pitches

  • Business reports

  • Whitepapers

  • Conference presentations

  • Web, app and product copy

  • Blogs and thought pieces

  • Customer service communications