Chapter 6: Deciding to Bid

Overview

Contractors often talk about their success in terms of 'hit rates' - one in four, say, or one in three. The question is which one in four, which one in three? What you ought to be winning are the contracts that will do most to help you achieve your marketing objectives, gain sustained income and add professional value to your services.

Writing a tender can entail a substantial commitment of time, money and other resources that might well be spent more productively in other ways or on other possibilities. The decision to bid needs to be based on a realistic and carefully weighed assessment of the opportunity, its potential benefits and its costs.

The basis of this decision will depend on an array of factors that include the financial situation, operational capacity and technical resources of your business; the strategic direction in which you see it moving; the professional demands of the contract; the nature, scale and duration of the work; the identity and status of the client organization; and the strength of any professional relationship you may have established with client personnel, among other matters. If the decision is positive, some of the aspects examined at this stage will need to be explored later in more detail as part of the technical analysis of the bid specification (Chapter 7); but this initial assessment involves a different set of considerations, aimed at determining the merit of a bid rather than defining its content.