Concerns About Tendering

Just to remind ourselves of some of those advantages for Small to Medium Sized Enterprises (SME's) to go for public sector tenders:

1)    Guaranteed recurring revenues from having regular contracts

2)    Increasing the value of the business as a result of that

3)    Not having to spend as much time and money seeking new customers of you have some big regular ones

4)    Having customers who will be guaranteed to pay you and who will be in no danger of going out of business owing you money

5)    The prestige of having some reputable customers and being able to use that as a selling point to others.

So why aren’t more companies going down a route that offers the potential for such attractive returns? In this article, I will just go through some of the reasons I come across when discussing the matter with companies that haven’t (yet) ventured on a journey down the tendering route and will try and address those concerns. Most of them are understandable and valid concerns but they need not be insurmountable obstacles:

1)    I haven’t got the time From my experience, I would be the last person to deny that tender writing can be a very time-consuming and tedious affair. There are lots of documents to go through and questions to answer, sometimes quite lengthy ones. The key here is planning, if you just suddenly decide that you want to go for a tender that you’ve seen advertised and it has to be submitted in 2 weeks, then trying to write it on top of your “day job” is certainly going to be a very stressful experience. If however, you make a strategic decision to go for tenders you can then do some research on what is needed, look at some that are available in your field, and then practice some responses at a  more leisurely pace over a period of several months. Then, when you are ready to go for one, you will then find that a lot of the work will already be in place. And as soon as you have a few under your belt, you can then tweak a lot of what you’ve done for others as well.

 2)    I don’t know enough about it That’s OK, none of us can be experts in everything. What you are an expert in, however, is your own business and the area in which you operate. So if you do have the confidence that you can deliver a contract that you see advertised, you can learn about what you need to do in completing the tender and reading through the documentation. Different public sector bodies will also have some helpful tips in the Procurement sections on their websites. You will also be able to submit questions regarding individual tenders to the purchasing body and they will provide helpful answers.

 3)    I’m too small and it’s just for big companies Not necessarily, the UK Government have set a goal that they want one third of all public sector contracts to go to SME’s but they are only about halfway to that. But having said that, some of the bigger contracts will only be suitable for bigger companies. In such situations the best approach is to initially concentrate on the smaller ones and in the case of bigger ones, you can consider teaming up with other companies to form a consortium for a specific tender, or approach a bigger company to see if they could subcontract some work to you on tenders that they are doing.

 4)    I’ve tried in the past and we got nowhere If at first you don’t succeed, try, try and try again! And to help you do that, the body to which you submitted your tender is obliged to give you feedback on your tender, telling you what you did well and how you could have improved on it. And just because you didn’t succeed the last time, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you will fail again, you will undoubtedly have improved your business in some ways since then. And remember, there are no such things as “failures” in business, just lessons. As I said in a previous article, even writing an unsuccessful tender is a valuable learning experience, helping you to do a better job on the next one.

 5)    It’s all corrupt anyway With some of the bad publicity that has surrounded the awarding of some public sector contracts (especially relating to the Covid pandemic) it’s very easy to get a bit cynical. However, such instances are very rare in this country, there are strict rules to ensure fairness and transparency in the awarding of contracts and you can take it from me that those rules are faithfully followed in the overwhelming majority of cases.

So my message is a simple one, don’t let your understandable concerns about the tendering process put you off some great opportunities for your business. If you just want to know more or further discuss any of the points discussed in this article, just drop us a line and we will offer you free initial advice with no obligation to go any further.