Want to Increase Your Chance of Winning A Tender Or Bid?

Ok you want to bid for work?  Great but you are a small company and are not sure whether you have much chance of winning.  So what do you do?

How about a Business Partnerships?  Working with another company expands your potential, experience, abilities and hopefully profits. Not only that but hopefully you will learn from your business partner.

First of all what kind of business partner should you look for?  Well you need a company that you can work with first of all.  Next they need to have some skills that will enhance the proposal that you want to put forward.  There should obviously be some kind of synergy with the companies as well as a willingness to work together on the resulting project.  So if you are a plumbing company you can work with another plumbing company and enhance the amount of work that you can undertake.  Alternatively you could work with a carpenter/general builder/joiner/electrician etc and bid for a larger slice of a total project.

Some of he benefits of working with a partner are:

-                    Spread the risk and costs of bidding – preparing and writing proposals can be expensive.

-                    Obtain experiences that you do not have to make the bid that much more interesting and appropriate.

-                    Gaining corporate experience from each other.

-                    Your staff gain valuable skills and experience in larger projects than you currently undertake.

-                    Your organisation becomes better known within the market.

-                    The different views of life, problems and business that each of you have can be shared.

You should also ensure that you partner also benefits!

Of course there are going to be problems:

-                    You must get on and be able to work together on the resulting project.  Arguments look unprofessional and cost money!

-                    You need clear boundaries and responsibilities and know who is in charge on the project.  This may mean one company is in charge of the other’s staff for some time.

-                    The split of work must be appropriate to reward – in other words – you receive the value of the work that you do.

-                    You need to check that you are not expected to be responsible for matters you have no control over?

-                    Your skills and experience must compliment each other so that you can help each other out as required.

Good Luck