Pre Contstruction Lead

London Fire Solutions; Gillingham; On-site; GBP 50,000 - 70,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading fire protection firm in Gillingham is seeking a Pre-Construction Lead to manage tender processes and ensure compliance throughout. This role involves coordinating the commercial team, supporting bid submissions, and maintaining a strategic pipeline of opportunities. The ideal candidate will possess strong organizational skills, and experience in bid management is essential. This position offers the chance to drive process improvements and support the company’s growth strategy. Competitive compensation is available with benefits.

Benefits

Competitive salary

Opportunity for professional development

Qualifications

• Proven experience in managing bids, tenders, and estimating support within construction or fire protection.
• Experience implementing structured bid processes (Gateways, Go/No-Go, Settlement reviews).
• Excellent written communication skills.

Responsibilities

• Manage and coordinate the end-to-end tender pipeline.
• Ensure compliance and governance throughout the bidding process.
• Facilitate communication between teams during the tender period.

Skills

Bid Management

Compliance Strategy

Process Mapping

Communication

Proactive Management

Education

Experience in managing bids, tenders, and estimating support

Experience with Governance in bid processes

Tools

HubSpot

Job description

The Pre-Construction Lead is responsible for running and coordinating the end-to-end tender pipeline, sourcing new opportunities, coordinating bid submissions, and coordinating the commercial team to ensure all deadlines, commercial inputs, and client requirements are met. Reporting to the Commercial Manager, the role supports commercial outcomes by owning the pre-contract process, governance, and coordination of bids. Accountability for commercial decisions, pricing, and bid success or failure remains with the Commercial Manager, who delegates delivery of the pre-contract process to this role. This role is central to supporting the company's growth strategy, driving process governance, improving bid quality and consistency, and ensuring high-quality, compliant bids.

Key Responsibilities

1. Strategic Pipeline & Opportunity Management

• Pipeline Tracking: Using HubSpot, maintain and update a comprehensive tracker for all submitted, tendering, and future key bid opportunities.
• Sourcing: Identify new tender opportunities across frameworks, portals, and client networks.
• Go/No-Go Decision Making: Manage and facilitate the "Bid/No-Bid" process using a weighted scoring matrix, ensuring every decision is documented and approved prior to resource allocation. Final decision ownership sits with the Commercial Manager.
• Market Insight: Provide commercial insight on tender viability to support Commercial Manager decision making and ensure senior leadership is aware of key opportunities.

2. Bid Management & Governance

• Lifecycle Management: Manage the full bid lifecycle to ensure structure and consistency—Pipeline Identification, Bid/No-Bid Preparation, Actions/Strategy Formulation, Governance & Planning, Kick-off Meeting, Mid-Bid Reviews, Final Review and Approval, Preparation, Submission, Social Value & Post-Bid Analysis.
• Compliance Strategy: Establish a Compliance Matrix from day one of every tender to ensure all client requirements are captured.
• Review Process: Enforce a structured review regime, including at least two formal reviews (Mid-Draft + Final Review) and preparation for Commercial Manager and Executive sign‑off before submission.
• Risk Management: Coordinate Commercial, Legal and Risk sign‑off for any non‑standard contract terms or requirements.
• Social Value: Coordinate the development of Social Value proposals within bids to meet increasing client demands.

3. Commercial Coordination (Pre‑Contract)

• Team Coordination: Organise and manage deadlines for the commercial team (QSs, Estimating and Operational inputs) to ensure timely bid construction.
• Clarifications: Support the commercial team and Commercial Manager with information gathering, tender queries and client communications during the tender period.
• Stakeholder Engagement: Work closely with Operations, Production, Compliance and Finance to gather technical information needed for bids.

4. Process Improvement & Reporting

• Process Mapping: Work with internal and external resources to interview staff, map current processes and compare them against industry best practices to streamline operations.
• Knowledge Management: Improve and maintain the centralised knowledge library, including bid templates, case studies, CVs and method statements.
• Post-Bid Learning: Implement a formal "Post-Bid Lessons Captured" process to analyse outcomes and feed improvements into future bids.
• Executive Reporting: Provide a regular report to the SLT via the Commercial Manager detailing:
  • Bid activities and pipeline status.
  • Win/Loss ratios and analysis.
  • Process improvement updates.
  • Sensitive staffing/resource information relative to the bid team.

Desired Attributes

• Structured & Process-Driven: Ability to enforce governance and deadlines while supporting Commercial Manager accountability.
• Proactive: Takes ownership of the tender process delivery, ensuring nothing is missed from the Compliance Matrix to submission.
• Communicator: Strong communicator who can chase teams effectively and present updates to the Commercial Manager and senior team.

Performance Measures (KPIs)

• Bid Quality and Compliance: Accuracy and compliance of submissions (measured by feedback and scoring).
• Process Compliance: 100% of bids passing through the defined Gateway/Governance stages (e.g. signed‑off Bid/No‑Bid forms).
• Timeliness: 100% on-time submission for all bids.
• Visibility and Reporting: Clear and timely pipeline and progress reporting to the Commercial Manager.

Qualifications

• Pre-Construction / Pre-Contract Expertise: Proven experience in managing bids, tenders and estimating support within construction or fire protection.
• Governance: Experience implementing structured bid processes (Gateways, Go/No-Go, Settlement reviews).
• Organisational Skills: Strong ability to manage multiple deadlines and coordinate cross-functional teams.
• Communication: Excellent written communication with the ability to create compelling technical and commercial content for proposals.
• Systems: Confident in using tender portals, CRM (e.g. HubSpot) and document management systems.
• Desirable Knowledge of passive fire protection, fire doors or compliance-driven contracting.
• Ability to write and structure Social Value responses for public sector tenders.