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What level of service can I expect from your success/contingency-fee proposal writing model?
What level of service can I expect from your success/contingency-fee proposal writing model?
OmniSync Support avatar
Written by OmniSync Support
Updated over a week ago

Proposal writing services are available either as Add-Ons on top of any of our Applicant Plans or included within some of our Plus or Pro plans (regardless of whether you are an Applicant or Super Applicant). For a quick brush up of our pricing tiers, the reader is encouraged to review our website https://www.turbosbir.com/#pricing.

Success-fee or contingency-fee based proposal writing is one of the services that we offer to any startup that desires such support. On this model, our writing team assists startups with writing the technical/scientific/commercialization sections of their grants for no upfront add-on cost. Instead, the startup signs an agreement to pay us a specific % of their grant/contract value, if and when they win. This fee is usually included as part of any SBIR/STTR application budget, as a profit fee, which is the government's way of giving for-profit companies a profit for the work that they are performing on the grant/contract. Thus, this model is also known as a profit-sharing model.

More than half the applicants to the SBIR/STTR program don't win their grant/contract, regardless of how well the proposal is written, due to factors that are beyond anyone's control. Thus, we as a for-profit company and service provider are taking a tremendous risk in putting in large amounts of time/effort from our PhD-level writing team on projects that we may never earn any money from, and largely for no fault of ours. Unlike most consulting agencies, TurboSBIR was built to democratize the grant/contract industry to bring increased government funds to smaller, non-traditional startups, and so we don't pre-qualify companies based on whether we think they will win or not, because we want to give every startup a chance and we've been pleasantly surprised before!

Owing to the high volumes of clients that we receive and the immense inherent financial risk in this model, our team has to serve clients in a highly efficient and economically feasible manner to enable us to continue offering such services to bootstrapped startups that need it. Thus, the success-fee model cannot offer white-glove/on-demand support. Clients will be working on the TurboSBIR team's timelines (normally 2 weeks from date of content transfer to first draft, but varies depending on agency deadlines) and process (all registrations, admin/budget documents, and content for written portions, need to be prepared and completed by the client on the TurboSBIR app). The success-fee model also cannot offer unlimited hours of phone calls/chat conversations with our writers. Clients will minimally receive the number of calls and drafts as per the tier selected, with additional support provided upon our team's discretion. We reserve the rights to serve clients beyond the minimum amount depending on a variety of factors.

As soon as you request the writing service from our team (using the service request form, the link to which you will find in your onboarding email), you will receive an email within 24 hours to schedule your introductory call with our writing team lead. This kick-starts your project. After you provide all your background material pertinant to the proposal, and depending on the tier selected, the writing team will execute proposal drafts and schedule additional calls.

Clients are cautioned to note that our writers cannot serve as fractional CSOs/CTOs/CMOs for companies. So, even if we could, it is not our writing team's job to teach clients how to build, test, or market/sell your product/technology (you should rather get a technical cofounder/lead for your team, if you need this support). So, while we can review your plans and advise on quality, we cannot create those plans for clients from scratch. Clients should also note that writing services are meant for written sections of the proposal (narrative/project description/research strategy/aims etc.) and do not include assistance with budget or administrative doc preparation. For support on the latter services, please use the large amounts of information, templates, samples etc. on the app workflows or use one of the other Add-On services, such as hourly strategic consulting ($150/hr) or administrative assistance support ($50/hr).

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