About Japade

Japade started in 2013 in a small office off Stokes Croft. Bristol's construction and public-sector supply firms were spending days building tender documents by hand, and often missed submission windows because of one missing form or a signature in the wrong place. That was the original problem we set out to fix. Thirteen years later, we still work from the same street, now at 145 Stokes Croft, with a team that has grown to six people and a client list that has passed 700.

The company was founded by a former procurement officer who had spent years on the other side of the desk, reviewing bids for a local authority. She saw the same mistakes repeated across submissions: inconsistent formatting, missing method statements, financial figures that did not reconcile with the technical proposal. Rather than continue reviewing rejected bids, she decided to help businesses avoid rejection in the first place. Japade began as a one-person consultancy and has since taken on 920 completed jobs across two areas of Bristol and the surrounding region.

What We Set Out to Do

Our purpose is straightforward: we help organisations respond to public and private tenders without the process taking over their working week. We are not a marketing agency and we do not write bids that make promises a client cannot keep. Instead, we structure the information a business already has — its qualifications, past projects, pricing, staffing — into a document that answers what the buyer actually asked for.

We think about this work in terms of clarity rather than persuasion. A tender response is a technical document with a deadline attached. It needs to be accurate, complete, and easy for an evaluator to score. That is the standard we hold every submission to, whether it is a small maintenance contract for a housing association or a multi-year framework agreement with a public body.

Looking ahead, we want to keep the business at a size where every client still has direct contact with the person handling their submission. We have deliberately not expanded beyond two districts, because doing so would mean adding layers of account management between the client and the writer. That trade-off has shaped every decision we have made since 2013.

How We Work

• Read the brief twice. Most disqualifications happen because a requirement was skimmed rather than read. We check the evaluation criteria against the draft before it goes anywhere near a client for sign-off.
• Keep numbers consistent. Pricing schedules, method statements and CVs must all tell the same story. We cross-check figures across every section of a submission before it is finalised.
• Meet the deadline with room to spare. We typically reply to a new enquiry within one hour, and we build internal deadlines a few days ahead of the actual submission date, so there is time to fix problems.
• Say no when it is not a fit. If a client's experience clearly does not match a tender's minimum requirements, we tell them before they spend money on a bid that will not score well.

Experience Behind the Work

Over thirteen years we have covered eleven distinct service areas, from pre-qualification questionnaires to full tender writing and post-submission debriefs. Of the 702 clients we have worked with, 166 have returned for a second project — usually because a framework renewal came up, or because their business grew into a new category of contract. We take that repeat work as a more honest measure of what we do than any marketing figure could be.

The six of us split responsibilities by area rather than by client size. One colleague focuses on financial schedules and pricing models, another on technical method statements for construction and facilities contracts, and a third on compliance documentation such as insurance certificates and policy statements. This means a client's submission is usually reviewed by at least two people before it goes out, simply because of how the work is divided.

We do not claim a win rate, because tender outcomes depend on the buyer's own scoring panel and on factors outside our control, including price competition from other bidders. What we can say is that our submissions are complete, formatted to the buyer's template, and delivered ahead of the deadline. That is the part of the process we are responsible for, and it is where we put our attention.

Our Values

• Honesty about fit. We tell clients directly if a tender opportunity does not suit their current capacity or experience.
• Plain language. Tender documents are already dense with technical requirements. We write in plain English wherever the brief allows it.
• Respect for deadlines. A submission portal that closes at noon does not care about good intentions. We build our schedules around the buyer's clock, not ours.
• Confidentiality. Client pricing, staffing details and past project data are handled under written confidentiality terms and are not shared between clients, even within the same industry.

Questions We Are Often Asked