Strategy and cost certainty, before the contract is signed.

Tender strategy & commercial submissions

A senior second pair of eyes on the tender before submission. Pricing narrative, risk pricing, qualifications and assumptions, commercial submission structure. The goal is straightforward: catch what the team cannot deliver, qualify what they do not own, and submit a commercially defensible bid that holds up if it wins.

Contract review

FIDIC Red / Yellow / Silver / Emerald (1999, 2017, 2019 editions); NEC3 and NEC4 across Options A, C, E; ICC; JCT; and bespoke main-contract and subcontract forms. Read not as a legal document but as an operational instruction set: what does each clause require the project team to actually do, where are the time bars, where are the unforgiving notices, and which Particular Conditions have shifted the standard-form risk profile.

Bill of Quantities preparation and review

BoQ preparation, measurement review, and alignment between BoQ, drawings and specification. Where the BoQ is incomplete or inconsistent with the drawings, the commercial exposure is real. A pre-tender review catches these before they convert to disputed valuations after award.

Value engineering and risk pricing

Value engineering proposals priced with both their up-side and their commercial exposure if the VE is rejected partway through. Risk pricing built on a registered risk schedule, not on whatever buffer the estimator happened to add to each rate.

Commercial governance and risk management setup

Commercial governance set-up for the project team: who owns what, what the notice rhythm looks like, how the CE pipeline runs, how the risk register aligns with the contract mechanisms. Done at the start, this is the single biggest determinant of recovery later.

How it usually works

Most pre-contract engagements run as fixed-fee or short day-rate work. Typical scopes: a one-day or two-day intensive on a specific tender or contract review; a focused fixed-fee deliverable (e.g. a marked-up contract with annotated risk register); or a short retained engagement covering the period from tender preparation through to contract signature.

Every engagement starts with a confidential 30-minute call to scope the work and confirm there is no conflict.