I offer clients two training products and three consulting services to take their tenders to the next level.
My training products are:
My consulting services are:
Here's more detail on each of those:
Second is nowhere: in tenders, winning is everything.
If you systematically apply my seven tender-winning principles, you will win more contracts. This is my promise to you.
Winner Takes All is an interactive, high-energy, one-day open course on tenders best practice held every month in central London that will help you outperform your competitors. Showing you how to apply my seven tender-winning principles (see diagram and running order for the day), this is a non-industry specific course for up to 12 people on principles that I've proven over more than 100 major tenders win contracts. Previous delegates have claimed that this course transformed their approach to tenders — and their win-rate. It can do the same for you too.
The course will give you much more than theory: you will participate in group exercises; hear real-life examples, anecdotes and war-stories; and get hints, tips and practical tools in each of the seven principles which you can apply on your next proposal. There are 13 great reasons for attending. You will learn how to:
1. Focus your limited resources on the right opportunities.
2. Choose the right team to win them.
3. Treat bidding as a competitive influencing campaign, not just a document.
4. Win more public sector contracts by submitting ‘compliant’ bids.
5. Get shortlisted more often by more public sector buyers.
6. Master the internal and external logistics of the process.
7. Meet decision-makers and impress them.
8. Write concise, compelling and distinctive bid documents.
9. Produce consistently strong, winning oral presentations.
10. Learn from every tender, so that each is better than the last.
11. Boost your confidence in tendering.
12. Sound and behave like a proposals expert.
13. Use competitive tendering as a recession-buster.
All of which will result in a higher win-rate.
Download a copy of the running order to see for yourself how comprehensive it is.
Normal price: £499.00 + VAT. But I'm slashing this in half for my next workshop on Wednesday 26 March at the London Chamber of Commerce. Pay only £249 + VAT. This is a once-only offer (the April workshop will go back to the usual price). For £249 + VAT you get a comprehensive workbook with copies of all the slides, practical tools (eg a pre-qualification template) you can take away with you, lunch and all refreshments. And if you recommend the course to someone outside your organisation and they attend, I'll send you a cheque for £50.
Please email me for more details of the 26 March event.
If you'd prefer Winner Takes All in-house and can muster at least five people from your organisation, then I can tailor it to your particular needs. My fee for this product depends on the number of people attending and the degree of tailoring you require. Please call me on + 44 (0)20 8671 0457 for a no-strings attached conversation, so that I can understand your specific issues better. I have delivered several in-house versions of the workshop, both in the UK and overseas.
A one-day open course held in central London on how to write compelling, distinctive, engaging and winning bids. Packed with learning points you can apply immediately and group-based writing exercises (no solo work to put people on the spot), the course addresses the three steps of writing a bid document: planning, drafting, editing.
People who attend the course learn how to:
On the day I'll also share with you four practical writing techniques which, if you're not already using them, will improve your bid documents overnight. And I give you constructive, one-to-one feedback on written samples you send me before the course. Clients find this service particularly useful.
Price: £300 + VAT per attendee, with a minimum of five attendees. Please call me on + 44 (0)20 8671 0457 for details of forthcoming courses.
This is an audit of your most recent tender submissions. You get an overall assessment of your document(s), a detailed list of issues/areas of weakness, and improvement recommendations that you can implement immediately. My aim is to identify changes that will have the biggest impact on your success rate in the shortest time.
To review your documents I use a traffic light system and
PLUSS (developed by my sister business, Write for Results):
Power: includes overall impact, and the strength of your value for money proposition.
Layout: look & feel, general appearance, presentation, navigability.
Usage: spelling, grammar, punctuation.
Structure: architecture, flow, balance.
Style: variety and interest value of language; use of plain English, active vs passive voice, metaphor, verbs vs nouns.
I also use the statistics in Word to measure readability. This takes some of the subjectivity out of the audit and gives you practical ways to further improve your next draft of the bid document.
Price: starts at £500, but beyond that the fee depends on the number of documents, their length and the level of analysis you want. Maybe you're working on a tender right now and want some expert feedback, or you've just lost a bid and want to know why. A modest initial investment now could give you valuable insights and save you thousands of pounds in the future. So why not call me on + 44 (0)20 8671 0457 to discuss?
Whenever you bid for a public sector contract that has been tendered under the ‘Restricted’ procedure (see Glossary), you have to complete a PQQ. This is a crucial document: it helps the contracting authority decide if your company is eligible to be invited to bid for the contract. Public sector bodies use it to determine their short-list, so it must be totally compliant.
PQQs can be onerous. Typically they ask for information on your administrative set-up (eg partnership, sole trader, limited company), the history of your organisation, any prior/current contact with their organisation, your economic and financial standing, your track record in providing similar services, your main business activities split by turnover, client references, your technical/delivery capability (ie can you do it?), capacity (do you have the resources to do it?), how you train and look after your staff, as well as the vital policy documents for Health & Safety, Environment, HR, Equal Opportunities/Diversity and Disability.
When you are under pressure to complete a PQQ, you don’t want to be scrabbling around collating these documents and this information at the last minute. What’s the answer? Let me help you put together a virtual and physical ‘war chest’ of the current version of all the relevant documents, so that anyone involved in the tendering process can access them quickly and easily.
What are the benefits of a ‘war-chest’? You save time and ease what is already a stressful and time-consuming process, which has no guarantee of success. You also lower your opportunity cost: completing the PQQ more efficiently lowers the chances of neglecting existing clients, programmes or other commercial activities that need managing. It lessens the impact of tendering on the business.
Price: starts at £500, but depends how much of the war-chest you already have in place and how consistently presented it is.
Treat this service as an extension of your bid team. I can work alongside them or just with the bid manager, on any or every stage of the tendering process. This includes but is not limited to:
Buying this service will give you two huge benefits:
You may choose to involve me in every stage of the tender, or merely at certain key points for an injection of best practice, gentle guidance, healthy advice or robust challenging. Clearly that's up to you and your budget. What I advise all my clients, however, is this: the earlier in the process you bring me in, the better the results you'll get.
Price: if my intervention is a day or two, I usually charge by the day at my standard rate of £1,500. For longer interventions, we can agree a set fee for my whole involvement. And for established clients, I sometimes link part of my fee to the result of the bid. Again, please call me on + 44 (0)20 8671 0457 for an exploratory conversation.