How To Use Professional Bid Writers To Boost Your Business
If you’re an owner of a small business, you find you have a lot of tasks on your plate.
From the completion of jobs to admin and managerial commitments, many business owners find that they are short on time and often simply aren’t in the right ‘headspace’ to sit down and formulate a well-written, succinct, and persuasive proposal when responding to an opportunity that has been put out for tender.
Fortunately, the outsourced bid writing market is blossoming, and there are many experienced professional bid writers available and looking for work with companies like yours.
If you’re new to hiring bid writing specialists, you may feel overwhelmed by the choice of professionals available. Here’s how to sift through the proposals and find a writer who matches the style and culture of your business.
Why Hire A Professional Bid Writer?
Technical Knowledge:
Prequalification Questionnaire (PQQ) documents must be filled in when responding to contracts put out for tender, but they can be difficult to navigate if you are not experienced in writing your own bids.
The specifications are often long and complex, may be daunting if you aren’t used to them, and can require a lot of time and effort that many busy business owners simply don’t have.
However, specialist bid writers are experienced in writing to a brief, and can produce a professional and polished application in a fraction of the time.
Experience:
Bid writers will already have years of experience under their belts, meaning that they can complete the PQQ documentation more quickly and efficiently than an inexperienced writer. They will have completed hundreds – maybe even thousands – of bids before, so will know what the client is likely to be looking for, and how to meet the requirements of the brief.
They will also know exactly what is required of each question, meaning that you are more likely to be successful in winning the bid.
Ultimately, this should place your business in a better position to win the tender!
Rigorous Process:
If you were to write your bids in-house, what would happen if your writer went off sick, quit, or had to focus on other, more pressing matters? Would you still be able to meet the application closing date?
Professional bid writers will have a rigorous process in place, and will usually operate in a team with other experienced writers. This means that no matter what happens, you have peace of mind knowing that your tender will be completed in an efficient and reliable manner.
Having the process planned out in advance helps to ensure good pacing and continuity, and that time can be allocated for quality checks and deadlines for each section.
This will keep the writing process to a schedule and ensure that there is no rush to complete sections further down the line.
Writing To A Brief:
Writing to a brief using an appropriate tone and structure is a skill in itself. Your brief will need to cover the unique selling points of your business, while also meeting the requirements of the specification.
If your business is lacking in certain areas, the brief may also need to gloss over these points.
Using a professional writer means that they will have experience in accentuating the positive qualities of your organisation, while also covering your tracks in areas where your business might struggle to meet the criteria.
More Successful Outcomes:
Hiring a professional writer gives you access to experience and writing skills that you might not otherwise have. This increases your chance of success when writing bids for new contracts, and will give you increased insight to be able to build your own skills.
Choosing The Right Bid Writer For Your Business
There are lots of different companies and writers out there that specialise in bid writing. Look for companies and writers that have experience in writing for your trade; this ensures they will know your industry inside out, and what your clients are looking for in an application.
Don’t be tempted to go for the cheapest option – writers who pitch their prices low may be less experienced, and/or have fewer skills than a professional who does it as their primary source of income.
Choosing A Service
Bid writing companies often have several different services that they offer. Choose a service based on the requirements of your company, and what will suit your long-term vision.
Training: If you would like to train one of your in-house writers to write bids on behalf of your company, this service is a good option. A bid writing company will take on one of your employees, and train them to write bids according to precise specifications.
Your writer will receive support to meet their goals, and you get a qualified bid writer at the end of it.
Review: If you – or writers within your company – are capable of producing your own bid proposals, you may choose to write your bids in-house and then submit them for review by a professional bid writer. This is usually cheaper than getting a bid written from scratch.
The bid writer will draw attention to anything that requires re-writing, and you will get feedback so that you can improve your bid writing for future applications.
Partial Completion: You can also choose to write certain parts of the application yourself, and simply pass on the bits that you find more difficult or don’t have time for. The writer will review your application and let you know if anything needs changing.
Full Service: This includes the whole package: planning, writing, management, review, and feedback.
This is the best way to maximise your chances of winning the opportunity being bid on, and outsourcing the whole process to a professional will also give you peace of mind that the job is in the best possible hands!
Why You Should Consider Hiring A Security Team To Protect Your Business
Hiring a security team may seem like a challenge for many businesses, particularly SMEs who may have a limited source of revenue. But with levels of theft and burglary continuing to rise due to escalating costs of living and high levels of unemployment, it is more important than ever for businesses to invest in good quality security measures.
While security technology has become advanced over the past decade, thieves and burglars are adept at identifying dummy alarms and even dismantling and evading many types of live technology.
As such, investing in a security team helps to reduce the likelihood of thieves deceiving your security technology through methods such as tailgating or stealing ID cards, and can help to identify perpetrators more quickly and easily.
Let’s explore some of the reasons why you should consider hiring a security team for your business.
Why Businesses Should Consider Hiring Security Staff
There are many reasons why company owners invest in security personnel; here are just some of the ways that hiring security teams helps to better protect businesses against potential wrongdoers:
• Security Vulnerabilities Will Be Addressed
Criminal gangs are known to repeatedly hit businesses that they have identified as having poor security. This may mean that if your business has been targeted once, it is likely to be retargeted.
What’s more, once the word gets out that your business is lacking in security, you may even be targeted by other gangs – some of whom may be more efficient or more dangerous. If your business has been targeted by theft or burglary in the past, you should consider taking further security measures to protect your business.
In addition, if your business has recently experienced a fire or vandalism, there may also be significant damage to security technology and to the parameters of your premises. This opens up your business to all kinds of risks, from theft to being targeted by drug gangs.
Hiring security staff can help to safeguard your premises while your building is undergoing repairs, and will deter criminals from targeting your business.
• High Crime Areas Will Present Less Danger
If there is a high level of crime in your area, it may only be a matter of time before your business is targeted.
Hiring security from within your area ensures that they are likely familiar with the types of criminal activity affecting local businesses, and will have experience putting measures in place which have been effective for other, similar businesses.
In this case, hiring a security team can help to deter thieves and burglars, making it less likely that your business will be targeted in the first place.
• Late Night Operations Are Safeguarded
Thieves, burglars and violent offenders are most likely to attempt to target a business at night, when there are low levels of staffing, fewer witnesses and cover from the darkness. Working late can therefore present a significant danger to your employees – particularly female members of staff who may experience harassment, sexual violence, or who may be targeted by abusive partners.
Hiring a security team can help your staff to stay safe when working night shifts, and can help to resolve any issues as they present themselves.
• Emergency Responses Are Faster
In the event of an emergency, security guards are trained to respond quickly and effectively, and to report any situations immediately to the emergency services. Security guards are trained to respond to a wide variety of emergencies, from security breaches to fire outbreaks.
• Restricted Areas Stay Restricted
If your business is open to the general public and receives a large footfall, you may need to construct a visitation plan.
Security guards are experienced in putting together visitation plans which prevent visitors from straying into unauthorised areas, and are able to patrol your premises and challenge trespassers – thereby guarding against theft and other dangers.
• Intellectual Property Theft And Corporate Espionage Is Prevented
If your company handles large amounts of sensitive information, you may be at risk of intellectual theft.
This can put confidential information at serious risk, from corporate espionage to theft of sensitive information such as your employees’ and/or customers’ bank details, addresses and more. Thankfully, having specialist security teams in your business can help you mitigate these dangers; this is especially important when you consider how severe the fines for data breaches can be.
Good Security Measures Ensure Peace Of Mind
In summary, a security team can significantly improve levels of security in your business, acting as a crime deterrent and helping to ensure an effective response if your business is targeted. Using a security team can help to protect your business against a wide range of threats, from criminal activity to other risks, such as fire or medical emergencies.
While hiring a team may appear an initial cost, businesses can quickly recoup their losses by avoiding criminal activity that may cost thousands of pounds to recover from.
If your business has already been targeted by criminals, it is particularly important that you consider hiring security staff to prevent it from being retargeted.
Improving The State Of Your Mental Health Through Emotional Intelligence
Here’s why emotional intelligence is as crucial as IQ for personal success
For the longest time, there was the idea that people who make a big deal of emotional intelligence are simply low or mediocre IQ people. In the minds of a lot of people, those who make a big deal of their emotional skills and sociability are essentially compensating for the fact that they have a low or mediocre IQ. If only things were that simple.
The truth is, when you look at any organization, chances are high that the prime movers and shakers of that establishment are not at the top of the IQ chart for that organization. In fact, in many cases, the most progressive and successful organizations have CEOs that have IQs way below the smartest people in their organizations. The smart individuals, it turns out, are specialists. Either they work in the IT department, the planning department, or other areas, but when it comes to the actual operation of raw executive control of the organization, these individuals tend to have lower IQs.
What’s going on? You have to look at emotional intelligence. Success doesn’t just involve figuring out what to do. It doesn’t just turn on whether you know how to do things or not. Instead, a large part of success turns on whether you can really manage people who are often opposed to each other toward a common goal. You must be able to do this day after day, week after week, month after month. You must be able to scale this in the future and you must be able to communicate this clearly not only to your team members but also to people outside your team.
Interestingly enough, this skill set cannot be explained by IQ. This is where emotional intelligence comes in. Not only do you have self-aware to the point that you know what your feelings are, but you are able to communicate your feelings to others in such a way that you’ve become more persuasive and you are able to remind them about common goals. This is how you can tell whether a leader can motivate and inspire people around them to produce better and better results.
People with low emotional intelligence who are thrust into leadership positions often use fear, intimidation, or grotesque and cheap rewards to get what they need. Eventually, that gets old. That organization would stagnate if it doesn’t fall apart.
Emotional intelligence is crucial to any organization that is aiming for the fences. Make no mistake, if you’re trying to hit that home run, you need to be led by somebody who not only knows how to say the right things to the right people at the right time to produce the right results but also who is able to do this in many different contexts. That person must also be able to plan out the consequences of such emotional signals.
Understand the importance of emotional intelligence because if you want to be more successful in any area of your life, you need to confront this issue and you need to master emotional intelligence. It’s not as hard as you think. It is not complicated, it is not Greek, and it is not written in computer codes. You just have to know what you’re doing and what you’re dealing with.
Unfortunately, so many people think in habitual terms. They think that once they perceive certain things they can respond emotionally in a certain way. This is why they continue to struggle and don’t get the results that they otherwise have coming to them.
If you want to maximize your emotional intelligence, you need guidance. This FREE book “Improving The State Of Your Mental Health” The benefits of a healthy mind, will set you on the right path. Start with a blank slate. Start with what you know. Start with who you are.
What are anti-ligature blinds?
Anti-ligature blinds are becoming increasingly popular in a range of different settings. The way these blinds differ from traditional blinds is that they are designed to prevent suicide by hanging.
Initially, uptake for this type of blind was largely restricted to high-risk environments such as psychiatric hospitals and prisons, where suicide is common. In mental health environments and detention centres, suicide via hanging is common and preventative measures must be implemented. A huge range of objects could be used to create a ligature point, meaning anti-ligature systems are highly important.
Over the years, anti-ligature blinds have been supplied to hospitals, schools, student accommodation and even hotels.
How do they work?
There are a range of different systems on the market, but the most reliable could well be the magnetic anti-ligature system. YewdaleKestrel® products utilise load release magnets which separate when a downward force is exerted on the product. This means that the product falls to the ground safely and prevents suicide via hanging.
The magnetic systems used in Yewdale’s products are highly reliable because magnets don’t lose their strength for hundreds of years, guaranteeing a lifetime of lifesaving functionality.
Anti-ligature blinds usually have a magnetic connection point above the blind’s barrel. The blind is easy to reconnect to the magnetic bracket after it has fallen to the floor.
If you are considering an anti-ligature blind, Yewdale is a highly recommended company. Based in the UK, Yewdale produce a wide range of anti-ligature products, commercial blinds, and healthcare products including hospital cubicle tracks and medical curtains.
Yewdale produce other anti-ligature products too including a soft, lightweight en-suite door and other accessories such as soap dispensers, toilet roll holder, shelves and artwork. You can see the full range on the website using the link below.
Complete weight loss strategy
For those who want to lose weight
Research on the causes of obesity, knowledge about weight loss, and various diets for weight loss are updated every year. However, with the update of knowledge and the release of diet pills one after another, the obesity rate continues to rise every year, and there is no sign of wanting to decline. I used to be very, very fat, and I am also a person who is prone to obesity.
So I understand the voices of fat people, I really want to lose weight, but I tried many ways to lose weight at that time without success.
I have tried the common boiled meals on the market, eating less and moving more, but it was not until I tried other diets that I managed to lose weight. After I lost weight, I began to study the essence and method of losing weight, and wrote him in this weight loss strategy article, hoping to help you.
A few key myths about losing weight
The weight loss myth of eating less and moving more
The phrase “eat less and move more” is actually true, but most people do it wrong. Many people think that they should eat less of everything, so they limit their calories to a very low level, and it feels a bit like eating an ultra-low-calorie fairy meal. Then, for the hyperactive part, the first thing that everyone thinks of is aerobic exercise such as running, cycling, etc., but in fact, this is a very short-term and easy way to regain weight, mainly because eating too little is an easy way to lose weight. The reason for the loss of muscle mass, coupled with the fact that aerobic training is not helpful for muscle mass growth, causes the metabolism to drop too much.
Maybe you can lose 5 kilograms in this way, but if your metabolism declines, you will easily regain the weight. And it’s all the fat that gets back up, not the muscle you lose that makes you look fatter than before. This is what we call the yo-yo effect, lose weight, get fat back, get fatter than before, lose weight, get back on Fat, get fatter than before.
Stop taking diet pills and meal replacements
At this time, you may start to seek other ways, eat weight loss meal replacements, taking diet pills, and so on. But believe me, most diet pills will inevitably hurt the body, especially the gastrointestinal tract. You may actually lose weight in the moment, but when your gastrointestinal tract is damaged, you will be fatter than before.
The key to understanding how to lose weight
You must have thought, why some people will not gain weight no matter what they eat, while some people will gain a kilogram the next day after eating a little bread? What is the cause of obesity? This is not a simple answer that can be solved!
You can see the link to the picture below, mainly talking about the influencing factors of obesity, which are very, very complicated.
Image source: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/296290/obesity-map-full-hi-res.pdf
In the middle of this picture is the heat balance
So we can know that calorie balance is very important
But this article doesn’t keep preaching that calorie balance is the key to losing weight like other sites
If you don’t know what calorie balance is, you can probably imagine that our body has calorie consumption (exercise, thermogenesis, basal metabolism), and calorie intake (eating).
When calorie consumption exceeds calorie intake, the weight will drop, so the truth of weight loss is to eat less and move more, very simple. In the short term, it is really possible to simply achieve weight loss by eating less and moving more, but simplicity is not simple, because the operation of the body is very complicated. Many people think that they can control their calorie consumption, that they can achieve a lot of calorie expenditure by running all the time, and that eating fairy meals (low-calorie meals) can reduce calorie intake and then easily lose it.
However, according to research, 90% of people who use calorie control, eat less and move more to lose weight will fail or regain the weight.
Because eating less and moving more for too long, metabolism will easily drop, hormones will easily become imbalanced, and muscle mass will easily be lost. Even if you lose 10 kilograms, you will easily regain weight.
When losing weight, the body is like a factory
For me, the key to long-term weight loss and maintaining good posture is the environment in the body, such as hormones, the level of inflammation in the body, and the gastrointestinal system.
Think of the body as a factory
-Your hormones are the managers and workers of factory operations
-Inflamed condition is how good factory machinery and hardware are
-Calorie intake is wages for factories as well as fuel
If the manager of this factory is an idiot, or if the hardware in your factory is completely rotten, then no matter how it works, it will create a pile of waste. Just as our hormones are already out of balance and the level of inflammation in the body is very high, no matter how much you eat, if you don’t solve the existing problems, it will easily accumulate into fat. It may be easier to understand with a few examples.
Hormones vs Weight Loss
This study looked at the effects of sleep and weight loss
Research source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20921542
Both groups of humans were calorie-restricted, but one group slept 5.5 hours a night and the other 8.5 hours. Both groups lost weight, but the group that slept less lost 55 percent less body fat and 65 percent more muscle mass than the group that slept more. It is equivalent to losing weight, but most of the loss is muscle mass, which reduces metabolism and makes it easy to regain weight later.
There is such a big difference mainly because poor sleep has a negative impact. The imbalance of the secretion of these things will easily increase fat and reduce muscle.
This next study looks at the effect of insulin sensitivity on body composition!
Research source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19471290
Basically, many chronic metabolic diseases, obesity, and poor muscle-building effects are closely related to low insulin sensitivity. Insulin is an anti-catabolic hormone whose main function is to store nutrients in cells. For example, after heavy training, our muscles will be more sensitive to insulin, and the nutrients we eat will be more easily absorbed into the muscles. When insulin sensitivity is low, the nutrients we eat are more likely to be stored as fat rather than absorbed into muscles.
We can simply say that the nutrients in the food eaten by people who are insulin insensitive are more likely to be stored as fat, and the relative fat mass will be much higher than the muscle mass.
To put it simply, the key to losing weight is actually to improve hormones, improve inflammation in the body, and add an appropriate calorie deficit. It is not difficult to achieve a calorie deficit. What is more difficult is how to choose the type of food that suits your body to improve hormones and achieve a long-term good body.
If you only pursue short-term weight loss and rely on a lot of calorie deficits to achieve the effect of weight loss, and then the hormones are still the same after the loss, then I can guarantee that you will gain weight very easily.
With so many ways to eat on the internet, which diet should I try?
When talking about losing weight in Taiwan 30 years ago, everyone would definitely want to use boiled meals
When it came to losing weight five years ago, everyone might think of using a low-sugar diet. When it came to losing weight in the past two or three years, everyone might directly think of the ketogenic diet.
I lost 30kg in 3 months on a low-sugar diet myself for the first time, so I used to believe that a low-sugar diet was the best way to lose weight
But after my long-term understanding of weight loss-related research, genetic cognition, and observation of students, there is no diet that is most suitable for everyone! Although it is said that high-carbohydrate foods will most stimulate insulin secretion, which in turn promotes the storage of nutrients into fat, some people are naturally good at metabolizing carbohydrates, so they can still be healthy and strong after eating high-carbohydrate throughout their lives.
For example, this study compared the responses of people with high and low insulin sensitivity to high- and low-carb diets.
Research source: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1038/oby.2005.79
The study concluded:
-For people with high insulin sensitivity, eating high-carb and low-fat to lose weight is very helpful
-However, people who are insulin insensitive use a high-carb low-fat diet to lose fat, but the weight loss effect is not so good.
But on the contrary, studies have also shown that people with low insulin sensitivity have a very good weight loss effect on a low-carb high-fat diet, which shows that improving insulin is very important for weight loss, and it also shows that people with insulin insensitivity are more suitable
Lose weight with a high-carb diet.
So if you have been obese for a long time, you know that you eat carbohydrates easily, or you know that you have diabetes in your family and want to lose fat, then I would suggest that you can start by reducing carbohydrates, which is what we call low carb diet!
The Negative Impact of E-Levy on Mobile Banking.
DEFINITION OF TERMS
Mobile Banking is a service provided by a bank or other financial institution that allows its customers to conduct financial transactions remotely using a mobile device such as a smartphone or tablet.
Electronic Transaction Levy or “E-Levy” is a tax applied on transactions made on electronic or digital platforms.
ADVANTAGES OF MOBILE BANKING
Mobile banking offers numerous benefits such as ease of transaction, convenience, time-saving, managing your finances, and budgeting. Some advantages of Mobile Banking in remote areas include:
Financial Inclusion — mobile banking offers convenient and easy banking services to people in remote areas. Thus, it allows banking on the go and offers all benefits of a banking system to rural areas without the presence of a financial institution.
Accessing the bank 24/7 — Mobile banking provides ubiquitous banking services without the need to visit the bank to have access to services. This offers time to benefit and ease of transacting at a distance.
Cost-benefit — Mobile banking saves the banks the cost of building physical infrastructures (branches) and maintaining branches and staff. Also, reduced costs on the customer side since the burden of visiting the bank for services is eliminated.
Improving resilience in the face of poverty — Mobile money acts as both a savings vehicle and a means of transferring funds during times of economic or environmental shocks.
Strengthening the formal economy — For many micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs), opening a mobile money account can facilitate access to formal financial services. Mobile money is well placed to address the issue of informality that blights many developing economies and hampers domestic resource mobilization efforts. Mobile Money enables ease of transacting, thus increasing business profits for MSMEs.
Facilitating economic growth — Mobile money has been shown to contribute to economic growth by increasing both productivity and per capita incomes
DISADVANTAGES OF E-LEVY ON MOBILE BANKING
The design of mobile money taxation policy appears to be the antithesis of a well-designed tax system. The disadvantages include:
Inequity — Mobile money taxes as currently structured to create inequity in the tax system. As the tax is mostly borne by the poor and users of the services are subject to additional taxation (unlike bank or cash transactions), the principles of both horizontal and vertical equity in the tax system are contravened.
Uncertainty -. Uncertainty and lack of transparency over taxation systems can have a direct impact on the operations of the tax authority, increasing enforcement costs, as well as discouraging investment.
Inconvenience — The administration of mobile money transaction taxes creates an inconvenience for MMPs who must calculate and collect the tax on the revenue authority’s behalf. There is an additional inconvenience for users of the service for whom remote digital transactions become more expensive or out of reach if they revert back to cash.
Inefficiency — Badly designed mobile money taxes have been shown to have a distortionary impact on demand for mobile money services. This in turn has had negative impacts on overall tax takes, as well as impacting the attainment of national economic and development goals.
EFFECT OF MOBILE BANKING — CASE STUDIES
The decision to impose taxes on mobile bank transactions will trigger so many problems.
Ghana — According to The Fourth Estate Ghana; Although the government projects a 24% decline in transactions when the levy is finally implemented, preliminary findings published by the bank of Ghana indicate the value of mobile money transactions had dropped by 3.2 billion in December 2021, less than 2 months after the proposal to introduce E-levy.
Uganda — An e-levy of 1% introduced in 2018 has led to an overall drop in the person-to-person transaction by more than 50%, and a 24% drop in industry transactions within the same year the tax was introduced according to a report by Global system for mobile communication (GSMA).
Congo — An e-levy of 1% was introduced in 2019. The government had to reverse the tax on cash outs only due to negative results of the levy on Mobile money users such as a decline in mobile money agents (unemployment) and high-value withdrawals by people.
Other countries include Benin (5%) and Cameroun (0.2%). In all these countries, the e-levy has imposed a negative effect on the economy and people. If we want to ensure the financial inclusion of people in rural areas, we need to ensure that we encourage mobile banking by withdrawing the e-levy tax.
Reference:
https://thefourthestategh.com/2022/03/16/e-levy-this-is-what-happened-when-other-african-countries-passed-it/
Purohit, S., & Arora, R. (2021). The benefits and challenges of mobile banking at the Bottom of the pyramid. Journal of Contemporary Issues in Business and Government Vol, 27(1).
Charles G. Kpan, Jr. is an Information Technologist with over 5 years of experience in the provision of Information Technology Services and an emphasis on Web Development and Visual Branding. He’s the managing Director of CYGEC IT SOLUTIONS INC. and holds a bachelor’s Degree in Information Technology from Blue Crest University, Liberia.