20 Insider Secrets

You Absolutely Must Know

Before You Bid On A Government Tender

Denis J. Thornton
Evince Systems
Evince Systems
20 Insider Secrets You Absolutely Must Know Before
You Bid On A Government Tender
Copyright ©2010 Evince Systems Ltd.
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Copyright  2010 Denis Thornton Evince Systems Ltd

Legal Disclaimer
This set of tips has been written to provide information about how to improve
tendering techniques. It is sold with the understanding that the advice contained
herein is based on the Author’s and the Publisher’s personal experiences and that
other people’s circumstances and results may vary to theirs.
Every effort has been made to make these tips as complete and accurate as possible.
However there may be mistakes in typography or content.
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warrant that the information contained in this programme is fully complete and shall
not be responsible for any errors or omissions. The Author and Publisher shall have
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We (Evince Systems) make every effort to ensure that we accurately represent our
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Copyright  2010 Denis Thornton Evince Systems Ltd

Contents Page
Introduction 1

#1. What’s the best way to get started on a tender? 3

#2. What do Government Tender Assessors look for in a winning bid? 4

#3. “I’m a good salesman, but I’ve never tendered for Government Business
4
before. How do I sell in a tender?”
#4. What do I need to AVOID doing in a proposal? 6
#5. How important is it to have slick, professionally designed, and smart-
7
looking tender documents?
#6. How important is technical detail in a Proposal? 8

#7. What is the best size for a Bid Team, and why? 9
#8. What is the biggest mistake people make when tendering for Government
10
Business?
#9. How do I write a great Executive Summary? 11

#10. What sort of software do I need to create – and manage – a tender? 12

#11. I’ve got the money to pay for a consultant to write my tender for me...
13
So why shouldn’t I just go ahead and hire him?
#12. When SHOULD I hire a consultant for tendering to Government
14
contracts?
#13. The proposal workload is HUGE! How do I keep track of all the
15
information the Bid Team generates?
#14. What’s the best way to check my proposal to make sure it’s the best it
16
can be?
#15. How do I create a Risk Management Plan? 17
#16. What are the 10 things every proposal team should do in the first 10
19
days?
#17. My Team is spread out over half the country! How can we produce a
19
proposal and keep our business running at the same time?
#18. What’s the best way to write proposal documents? 20
#19. I own a small company. Is it worth my while competing for Government
Tenders with big companies that have loads of resources? 22
(p.s. Read this if you’re in a BIG company!)
#20. What should my REAL aim be when developing a proposal for a
23
Government Tender?
About Our Company 24

Copyright  2010 Denis Thornton Evince Systems Ltd

Introduction

Hello, and thank you for requesting this guide.

My name’s Denis Thornton. I fly rescue helicopters for the
Coastguard, and it’s a great job. In fact, I’m writing this right
after a trip out over the ocean to drop a pump off to a boat. It
had sprung a fairly big leak and was sinking, but the pump got
them safely into port.

Now I really like rescuing people, but I never thought I’d ever end up rescuing
my own boss...

Last year he called me up. He knew that before I started flying I worked for the
government. And he wanted to know more about what exactly I did .
I told him that I’d spent about 5 years on a government team that assessed
tenders from companies hoping to win government contracts.
Basically, we decided who won and who lost. Now he was interested. You see, not
many people know, but in this country, the coastguard outsources its helicopters out
to a company on contract. What was bothering him was that the contract was up for
renewal. He was worried, because the only other contract we had at the time had just
been lost, and if we lost this one then he – and I – would be out of a job!

He wondered if there was anything I knew that could help swing the deal our way.
Well I could have told him plenty of stories about how companies mess up in really
basic ways when they send in tenders, if he’d had the time (he hadn’t). But how about
if I hung up my flying boots for a few months and came and made sure they didn’t
mess up in the same way? “No Problem”, I said, and “No Problem” was what I meant.

“Problems” was what I got. Big ones. I found out pretty quick that assembling a bid
for a government contract is a lot harder than assessing one.
Here’s the big problem: It’s TIME.
There is so much to do that time is desperately short. The next problem is working
out exactly what the Government wants – sometimes it isn’t that clear, and here we
were really scratching our heads. Then we had to make sure all the documents
matched, so they didn’t contradict each other. That meant that the team who was
working on them had to make sure they knew what everyone else was working on, all
the time. Not that easy when you’re in the same office, never mind different
countries.

And the worst thing about tenders is you know your company deserves to win it, but
if what’s great about your business isn’t brought out in the tender, the Government is
never going to know! So our biggest problem of all was how to show that we really

Copyright  2010 Denis Thornton Evince Systems Ltd Page 1

had all the answers by writing a bunch of documents that would somehow link
together and showcase what we had that our competitors hadn’t.

I realised then that the winning tenders I had seen and assessed in the past were not
put together by accident. And the rubbish ones probably were put together by
accident! So we needed some kind of system to make sure we got what we knew
about our business into what I knew about government tenders.

So I figured out a way to match tenders to the target documents by tweaking a

method used for planning disaster relief missions I picked up years ago in training.
Next I built a management tool on Excel to help coordinate all the work. And then I
downloaded some free tools from the internet like skype that would help us stay in
close contact and keep each other informed about what was going on.

Now that we knew what exactly the government wanted, and what we could do to
help, we could coordinate a really complicated answer in a simple way. In fact, it was
so simple that my boss – who hates computers so much he wishes he still had a typing
pool – reckoned I should patent it.

But you and I both know there’s no monopoly on a good idea, and the beauty of this
one was we could add to it and improve it the whole way through until it worked like
it was on rails.

And anyone can do the same, once you have a procedure to analyse the
government’s requirement (and their true, underlying wants and needs). All you need
then are a few tools to coordinate your team so that they showcase the best about
your company to answer those needs. And then you just have to structure the
documents in a way that sells your story to the government – and when you have a
few insider secrets of how that’s done, it’s like I told my boss: it’s “No Problem”.
This book will show you 20 insider secrets that you absolutely must know
before you commit to developing a bid for a Government tender.

They’re short, sweet and to the point. If you want to know more, or if
you have a question about tendering that you need answering, then
email me at Denis.Thornton@EvinceSystem.com.

Copyright  2010 Denis Thornton Evince Systems Ltd Page 2

 What’s the best way to get started on a tender?
1
Like all big projects, the best way to get started on any tender is to be well prepared.
Because tenders do tend to suck up a lot of your time, anything you do before the
Request for Tenders – The “RFT” is released – will save you time later; time you can
use to make your tender more on-target and effective. Make sure that everyone on
the team has all the software that you need and that their computers work well with
it – if one member of the team has a slow computer, it can make producing
documents very frustrating for them. The software you need is pretty basic –
Microsoft Office should be enough, but there are some other applications that will
make your life easier – more on that later in this series of tips.

Organise your team so that everyone knows what is expected of them and so they
can get up to speed with any background knowledge they might need, such as
technical data or finances. Assign one person the role of Bid Manager and document
editor. Make sure someone fully understands the financial aspects of your offer, and
make them the Finance Lead. And get the Bid Manager and Finance Lead to become
best friends! Make sure you pick people for your team who have a ‘can-do’ attitude.

Figure out how you as a team will communicate effectively with each other. This is
really important for 3 reasons. Firstly, you will need to share a lot of information
with each other quickly. Second, everyone in the team needs to know what you are
trying to achieve – no good someone going off in their own direction. And third, the
last thing you want is the Tender Assessment Team looking at a collection of your
documents that don’t match up – or worse – contradict each other!

Make sure you organise your electronic file structure correctly so that you can keep
track of the documents you produce, and don’t forget to track your documents using
version numbers because this will stop you from sending an old document to the
Government by mistake.

When you get the Request for Tenders, make sure you analyse what you are being
asked to do very carefully. Many bidders fail because they answer the question they
would like to answer and try to sell the Government what they would like to sell
them, rather than what they are actually being asked for. This is one of the most
important things you can do in preparing any tender!

Copyright  2010 Denis Thornton Evince Systems Ltd Page 3

 What do Government Tender Assessors look for
2 in a winning bid?
The first thing to remember is that you’re not selling to the Government as such;
you’re selling to a person. And that person has got many tenders to go through just
like yours. So naturally, they’re looking at your tender to see if you have answered
their questions and to see if you can do the work to a satisfactory standard.
But they have to be able to find this information easily, and it has to be
communicated to them simply.
There’s no need to use fancy phrases or loads of technical data. But you do need to
lay out the information in a clear, easy-to-follow format.
Include a contents list, and add page numbers, (many bidders don’t do this and it
frustrates the tender assessor), so that the assessor can quickly find the information
they’re looking for (don’t assume they will start at page 1 and work their way
through it like a novel).
Make sure you check your tender thoroughly to ensure that different documents
don’t contradict each other. You don’t want the situation where one document says
it will take 3 months to do something and another document says it takes 5 months
to do the same thing. The assessor will not know which is correct, and will also
suspect you of not having attention to detail – this will hurt your chances of
succeeding in winning the business, because they will be concerned that if you can’t
get the tender right, you might not get the work right either.
You want the assessment team to have a good feeling about what you’re offering,
and also how you have laid it all out for them. Human nature being what it is, they
will feel they can work with you better in the long term if they can easily understand
your tender and work through it easily.
In summary then, they’re looking for:
 Can you do the work?
 Comprehension – do you understand what they want – leading to...
 ... Correct Answers, and...
 Clear Communication

“I’m a good salesman, but I’ve never tendered

3 for Government Business before. How do I sell in
a tender?”
This question gets asked a lot by anyone who is used to selling the goods and
services of their company to normal prospects. In face-to-face, toe-to-toe selling,
you will have used language that creates emotion in your prospect in order to get
them to buy. Unfortunately the government rarely lets you in to see them face-to-

Copyright  2010 Denis Thornton Evince Systems Ltd Page 4

face before the winner of the tender is announced, so you have to sell through the
tender you’ve written instead.

Another problem is that any sort of unsubstantiated claims, brochure-type language,

or plain old hype is frowned on and will lose you points. So you have to use “Reason
Why” writing.

“Reason-Why” writing means that for every statement you make, you need to be
able to back it up with some kind of evidence, or at least give them a reason why you
have made the statement in the first place. One of the most helpful phrases you can
use to do this is “which means that”.

Here’s an example:
Say I’m tendering for a contract to replace the surface of all-weather football pitch at
a school. In order to sweeten the deal I might want to say that it comes with a 5-
year guarantee with a regular inspection routine. I would write in the tender (and
especially in the Executive Summary) that

“The finish is guaranteed for 5 years and will be inspected every 6 months, which
means that any damage incurred can be identified before it becomes significant,
and can be repaired with minimal disruption to the school.”

Some people would be tempted to use “persuasive” or “flowery” language to

achieve the same result but, while this might work in a face-to-face situation, it isn’t
appropriate for tenders. Generally, assessment teams just want the facts, but as you
can see from this example, you can still use the classic sales technique of a Feature,
followed by some Benefits, that many sales people like to use.

The other good thing about the statement above for the football field is that it
accepts that the surface will suffer wear and tear. That’s fine, because you’re
showing that you know this will happen and will deal with it. You’re being realistic.
A great number of companies would write something like:

“The finish is guaranteed for 5 years” or “The finish will look amazing and will be
perfect for 5 years”

The first doesn’t say enough, while the second is too gushy and also is masking the
truth or, as I used to say when I was a Government Assessor – “Lying”.
Just like you and me, Government Assessors appreciate honesty, integrity and
straight talking – but don’t be afraid to tell them what’s good about it either.

And do use plain language!

Copyright  2010 Denis Thornton Evince Systems Ltd Page 5

 4 What do I need to AVOID doing in a proposal?
There are four ‘cardinal sins’ of tendering that you want to avoid like the plague.
And while these sins are usually committed by someone in the team who simply
doesn’t want to work very hard, they can often be caused by the fact that time is
short or simply that some people aren’t sure what to write.

That’s why the Cardinal Sin Of Tendering #1 is DELAY. Don’t delay getting started by
a second, because on most tenders time is desperately short. Even if you do get
going right away, it can be very tight at the finish line, so any time you save by
getting started will mean that you’ll have a better chance of actually getting things
finished towards the end.

Cardinal Sin Of Tendering #2 is BRAGGING. Bragging about what you can do, will
do, or have done in the past, or how great your company is cuts zero ice with the
tender assessor. And it’s a huge waste of your valuable time. Use the “Reason Why”
writing technique mentioned in the previous tip and explain – truthfully and
compellingly - but without boasting, why you are the company for the job. Just like
you and me, the poor old Government Assessor rolls his eyes up in his head when he
hears bragging. And more to the point, it makes him think you could be hyping up
every part of your bid and mark you down accordingly!

Cardinal Sin Of Tendering #3 is BULLS**T. B.S. is, in my book, a bit different from
bragging. Bragging is boring us all with what you can do. B.S., on the other hand is
being economical with the truth, without telling an outright lie, or exaggerating what
you can do. It’s bad news for you in the longer term, because while it might – might
– help you win the tender (assuming it isn’t spotted by the assessor), it is guaranteed
to land you in trouble if you do win.

What happens when you have to deliver on your inflated promises? Well,
remember that most Government contracts have a ‘Revert’ clause, which means
that if you are awarded the coveted ‘Preferred Bidder’ status, you can usually be Un-
awarded it if you’re not up to the job, or have misled the Government. And it’s
painful to have to live up to expectations when it’s your fault you set them too high.
It’s always better to play it straight. The Government might not mind lying to us, but
lying to them is a quick way to losing a lot of money – fast.

Cardinal Sin Of Tendering #4 is “Crossing That Bridge...” Linked to B.S. is the devil-
may-care attitude of “we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it”. This is a mistake
because sooner or later that bridge will have to be crossed. This most often happens
when it’s a different part of the company that writes the tender than the part of the
company that has to deliver it. Something that is easy to say in the tender and is
said to make you look good - but is nigh-on impossible to deliver - will usually have
someone stating that they’ll cross that bridge when it comes to it, but this usually
ends in disaster.

Copyright  2010 Denis Thornton Evince Systems Ltd Page 6

Either the Revert clause is waved in your face, or fixing the problem costs you a
chunk of your profits, or it just can’t be fixed. Which means an unhappy customer
and zero chances of winning the tender the next time it comes around – or any other
one for that matter. When you hear someone utter the immortal words about
crossing bridges, if they aren’t going to be around when that happens, then you’d be
smart to stop whatever it is you’re about to do, and change it to something that will
let you sleep easy at night.

Remember: you will always be held to account for what you put in your tender!

How important is it to have slick, professionally

5 designed, and smart-looking tender documents?
Some people think that it’s important to have a tender that looks like a brochure for
an oligarch’s yacht. It’s got to be glossy, expensively printed, have tons of pictures
and costs a fortune to produce.

I’m here to tell you that you don’t need any of that.

Remember: I’ve assessed billions of dollars-worth of tenders for the Government

and I used what I know to win a €500 million tender only last year. And here’s what
I’ve discovered...

It is important to use diagrams, illustrations and graphics to help tell your story and
explain things. But there is no point at all in sprinkling lots of photos throughout
your tender that do not serve any direct purpose. I’m talking about the ones that
show smiling, earnest people getting on well with whatever it is you’re selling.
They’re a complete waste of time!

If you’re talking about facilities, then include a picture. If technical drawings will
help, then include them. If diagrams help show what you’re talking about then
include them. But at every stage, decide if the illustration – whatever it is – is really
going to help you.

The one thing I do recommend is that you should get someone like a graphic
designer to create your diagrams for you. This is particularly important where you
think you are going to have a large number of them, such as when you have to
explain the makeup of a number of teams or organisations. The reason why is
twofold: first, you can draw up a draft, fax it to the designer, and save a lot of time;
second, you can have all your diagrams using the exact same colour scheme and this
is about all you need to create the professional ‘look’ you want.

After that, nothing more than your company logo in the header or the footer of the
page should be needed.

Copyright  2010 Denis Thornton Evince Systems Ltd Page 7

Normal A4 binders with your company name on the front will do. If you want a
single image to convey your bid, then this is where to use it, along with the front
cover of your special documents such as the Executive Summary.

If your tender includes a lot of illustrations, then you will need to keep track of them.
Members of your team will be creating draft illustrations, these will be sent to the
graphic designer, they need to come back and be checked, and the designer paid. So
you need to have a good system for tracking all the illustrations, checking them
before they go to the designer (because mistakes are often expensive to correct
later), checking them when they come back, and quickly finding the part of the
tender where you want them inserted.

Finally, when you print your tender, it is important for the print quality to be good,
that is, without smears or lines across the illustrations, so you have 2 choices here.
Either outsource it to a local printers, which can often be the best option from a
quality point of view, but can mean you need time to spare at the end of the
process. Or you can print it in-house on something good like a laser printer, which
might save you time, but ensure you have a good back-up printer in case the one you
are relying on breaks down. With the amount of abuse you will give it by printing an
entire tender, the chances of this happening are good!

6 How important is technical detail in a Proposal?

Technical detail is tricky: too much and the assessment team won’t understand it,
won’t want it, will get bored reading it, or will think it’s irrelevant. Too little and they
might wonder if you’re the company for the job. So what is too much or too little
technical detail?

The first thing to remember is that – unless it is a completely open bid, and especially
if you have been pre-qualified – they will already know that you are competent to do
the task. So you should only supply enough technical detail to support or qualify any
statements you make.

So far, so obvious.

But if you have some very technical people writing on your team you might want to
remember that they are in their ‘comfort zone’ when they are talking tech! So they
might overload whatever they are writing with too much technical detail or
specifications. If they are, this is a good time to apply some ‘Reason Why’ sentences
(see Tip 3) to their documents.

Too much or too little can be a fine judgement which can lead to some arguments
which you can’t afford the time to have. So here’s what I do to keep everyone happy
– and mainly the Client!

Copyright  2010 Denis Thornton Evince Systems Ltd Page 8

To keep your main documents trimmed down in size , just get the main facts in
there. If something needs expansion, or is supported by a lot of technical detail,
simply make the statement of what the service or product or equipment will do, in
how long, or in what quantity, and refer the reader to more detail in an Annex, to
which they can refer if they want to prove to you.

I work with helicopters, and the manual for them tends to be on the large side, so I
can put the manual on a CD-Rom and refer to the appropriate section where they
can see for themselves that I am telling the truth. I don’t put all the detail up front in
the main document. No need to, and the assessor will thank me for it too, but the
information is included in the tender documentation anyway. It covers all the bases.

Say I was writing a tender for a new fire engine and one of the requirements was to
state how much water could be pumped over a fire before needing refilling. I could
say something like:

“The Fire Engine’s reservoir will project water to a distance of 50 metres at a rate
of 20 litres per second for a maximum of 1 minute. This rate can be adjusted,
however, to extend the duration to three minutes at a lower flow rate. The entire
range performance is available on Table 1 in Annex A”.

This satisfies any worries about not including too much or too little detail, while
giving the assessor a choice about how much they have to read in order to correctly
assess your proposal.

7 What is the best size for a Bid Team, and why?

Most tenders won’t need a very big team, but even if you’re bidding on what NASA
called the “Battlestar Galactica” projects, it’s best to keep your team size to no more
than 7 people. Fewer if you can. It’s always a compromise between spreading the
work out so that no-one is completely overloaded, yet keeping it in a tight-knit group
so that each person is aware – and familiar with – what everyone else is working on.

This is a really important point which is often overlooked by Bid Teams and not
discovered until it is way too late. Smaller teams communicate better and the
tipping point seems to come around 7 people. Any larger than that, and the chances
of mistakes increase dramatically. That isn’t to say that mistakes can’t creep in
within smaller teams, but they tend to be fewer in number.

The answer to this problem is to get properly organised. No matter the size of your
team, make sure that each task has a leader, and assign each leader a peer group for
that task.
The leader produces the work for the first draft and can then send it to his peer
group (who are leaders on their own documents) for review. They can then send
comments to him so he can improve his work.

Copyright  2010 Denis Thornton Evince Systems Ltd Page 9

But the real value of this system is that they are also much more aware of what he is
working on, and the angle he is coming from. This is a good way of avoiding
mistakes or contradictions in the other documents.
It isn’t foolproof of course, which is why the Bid Coordinator still needs to read every
document and edit where necessary, but it stops a lot of problems occurring in the
first place, which frees the Bid Manager for other tasks.

Be very careful about assigning tasks, deadlines, leaders and peer groups. Ensure
there is plenty of overlap of skills and knowledge so that mistakes are more likely to
be caught.

And remember that the bigger the team, the more chance there is for unbelievable
screw-up.
If you don’t believe me, then just look at NASA themselves. After putting a man on
the moon they had literally written the book on how to communicate among big
teams, but they’d managed to forget a lot of that by 1998. Late that year, they
launched a probe to Mars called the Mars Climate Orbiter.

It arrived a year later, but instead of going into orbit around Mars, it crashed into it.
The reason? One part of the team that designed it was using metric measurements
and the other was using imperial. And $327,000,000 went up in smoke!

So make sure your team is coordinated well and communicates well. A lot of how
that happens comes down to the way you get them organised, and for my bids I use
a special software tool I designed myself for just this purpose.

What is the biggest mistake people make when

8 tendering for Government Business?
There are some tactics in tendering that are so laughable – and transparent – that
some people don’t believe me when I tell them that it happens, but it does. The first
thing that anyone who tenders needs to keep in mind is this: it might be your first
tender or it may even be your fiftieth, but I guarantee you that the assessment team
has seen all the tricks before. And they are very easy to spot.

But by far the most common – and biggest – mistake that people who write
proposals make is when they “Cut and Paste” from an old proposal. I’ve seen this
done from old proposals that lost, which is clearly insane, but it’s more often done
from previous, winning proposals and it just doesn’t work.

You will end up with a disjointed and illogical proposal that proves hard to read and,
unless you are very careful – and people who pull this trick tend not to be – you will
make a mistake that the assessors will spot. Whatever effort has been put in will be
wasted, because the proposal will almost certainly fail.

I’ve seen one boss (thankfully who I stopped) from trying to cut and paste an
executive summary from a previous tender that had nothing to do with the one we

Copyright  2010 Denis Thornton Evince Systems Ltd Page 10

were writing. I wondered how he had written it so quickly (and why it didn’t make
any sense!).

And I’ve also seen one company that sent a tender to another company for a multi-
million dollar tender with the wrong company’s name in several parts of the
document. A dead giveaway, and a loss of that contract, where they were actually
the current contractor.

So, you have been warned! If you want anyone to give you a lot of money, be
honest and put the effort in, and you won’t ever make this mistake.

9 How do I write a great Executive Summary?

The Executive Summary - along with the Cover Letter - are the key documents in any
proposal and are your two primary sales documents.

On any medium to large-sized tender, few assessment team members – if any – will
read every document you produce in your bid. But all of them will read the Cover
Letter and Executive Summary, especially the key decision makers. This means that
every good thing about your solution needs to be highlighted in the summary of your
bid.

But how to write it? You need to capture the good and bad parts of your proposal as
they are being written. Generally there isn’t enough time towards the end of the
tender to review everything just for the purpose of making the Executive Summary,
so brief your team to note down every advantage and disadvantage of what they’re
producing as they create their work.

This achieves 2 main objectives. Number one, it gives you a handy list of points that
you can use to build your executive summary around. So rather than just producing
a dry summary of the bigger documents in compressed form, you can showcase the
tender and draw out what is great about it and why your company should be
selected.

Number two, capturing the areas where your tender is weak enables you to shape
the summary so that it guards against these issues being exploited. In some cases
you might want to acknowledge a weakness, but qualify it in terms of what else the
Client is getting, for example a competitive price. In turn, this allows you to develop
credibility, as no bid can ever be perfect in every way, and is a much better approach
than allowing something to be discovered later, when neither you nor your tender is
able to explain it.

Finally, there are 2 things you should put into your Executive Summary that don’t
appear anywhere else in the tender. A little section about your company: your track

Copyright  2010 Denis Thornton Evince Systems Ltd Page 11

record, achievements, values – in essence your company’s resume – right at the back
of the Summary, almost in an annex.

Also - and this is really important – include a brief 10-12 line resume on each of the
key team members that will deliver the project. This helps to personalize your
company from a ‘thing’ into real people that the other real people on the
government side will want to work with. It’s the single biggest credibility-building
thing you can do in your Executive Summary.

Remember: this is probably the most important document in your entire proposal,
so make sure you devote a lot of time to getting it right!

What sort of software do I need to create – and

10 manage – a tender?
The best thing about writing proposals is that there is very little extra software you
need – other than a word processor and email – to get the job done. There are
several applications that will make your life a lot easier though, and the good news is
that most of them are free.

First, you will need something like Microsoft Office, and in particular, Word, Excel
and PowerPoint. PowerPoint is handy for creating diagrams which can then be
saved as image files, if you don’t want to go down the graphic designer route, while
Word is obviously needed for bringing the documents together. Excel will be
necessary if you are doing any sort of financial data of course, but Excel is a very
flexible application and can also be used for creating timelines, prediction tools (for
example, projecting when people will retire in your organisation) and even for
ghosting the opposition’s bids! I also use Excel very heavily for organizing the work
in the proposal and each team-member’s individual workflow.

It’s even possible in Excel to produce a comprehensive ‘map’ of the entire tender,
who is working with who, how much work they have completed, and display
progress on a dashboard. It takes a little bit of time to set up, but once you have, it
saves literally days of time on conference calls and mistakes, because everyone can
have an updated situation report in their inbox daily.

Naturally, all of these functions can be replicated in Open Office, which is free, but
whatever you use, make sure you have an application that will transfer your files into
PDF format. No need to spend a fortune on Adobe Acrobat though; there are plenty
of third-party applications out there that will do this and I use Nitro PDF which is a
lot cheaper and just as good.

Other great free software: Skype, I use heavily, because it enables me to

conference call with the team – for free, as well as send them SMS messages, either
individually or as a broadcast, to let them know about changes to meetings etc.

Copyright  2010 Denis Thornton Evince Systems Ltd Page 12

Google Calendar is a superb tool for deconflicting diaries – much better than
Outlook, and it has a built-in SMS alerting system to your cellphone.

Jet Screenshot is a great tool for capturing images from your screen for insertion
into your documents.

And finally I like to use Gmail for my emails, even getting my company emails
forwarded to it, because there is so much communication when running a bid, that
it’s good to be able to quickly search for something you wrote a week or two ago and
Gmail is the best I’ve ever seen at being able to do this.

Incidentally, in the interests of full disclosure, I’m not an affiliate for any of the above
software, so I have nothing to gain by recommending them. I recommend them
because I’ve used them ‘in anger’ while managing bids and they’re incredibly useful.
I’ve got some videos on how to use them, so please get in touch if you want them.

I’ve got the money to pay for a consultant to

11 write my tender for me... So why shouldn’t I just
go ahead and hire him?
I’m a consultant myself, but my advice is that you want to be very, very careful about
getting anyone to write your proposal for you. Now if that sounds a bit like a turkey
volunteering for Christmas then let me explain…

If you get a consultant to write your tender for you, you’re probably doing it to save
time or because you might not have done it before. Maybe both. Both are valid
reasons of course, but remember that no-one knows your business better than you
do. No-one can sell your business better than you can. The first thing you’re going
to have to do with that consultant is to tell him all about your business and try to
make him or her an instant expert in what you do and what you want to provide in
your bid to the Government.

No matter how good they are, and some are very good, they will never be as expert
on your business as you are. So they will keep coming back to you with questions
again and again about your business, which will suck up your time. And if they don’t
come back with questions then perhaps you need to worry about what they are
doing. All the while this is costing you a lot of money, perhaps thousands a week.

At the end of the tender development process, you might have a winning tender, or
you might not, but you will have a large bill. But here’s something you won’t have:
EXPERIENCE. Which means that win or lose on this proposal, you’ll be back to
square one the next time you want to bid for a Government contract!

If you think about it, what any consultant brings to the table is a system for
developing the bid proposal and (perhaps) experience. They won’t know more

Copyright  2010 Denis Thornton Evince Systems Ltd Page 13

about your business than you because they can’t. Invest some time in developing
your own system for managing the work, and it will pay dividends down the road.

First, you’ll get the experience you need; Second you will save a ton of money; and
Third, you will end up with a far better tender because you will be able to transfer
your knowledge into the proposal in a much more detailed and integrated way than
a consultant ever could.

Which means you’re much more likely to win. Not just your first contract, but each
one after that.

But I’ll tell you the truth: writing a winning proposal is hard work and it is time-
consuming, but you are selling to the Government. And any kind of selling that
brings in the steady stream of cashflow that winning Government Business does is
worth your time and effort. So the more you can invest in setting up your system
before you even receive the Request For Tenders will repay you many times over
down the line.

OK, so when SHOULD I hire a consultant for

12 tendering to Government contracts?
My advice is that you should always attempt to work without consultants wherever
possible. It will save you money, and the amount of experience you and your
company will get by overcoming the problems that always arise in a tender is
invaluable to your future success.

But there are 2 occasions when I advise clients to hire a consultant: the first is if you
and your team need to be trained to tender. Some consultants will do this and it
becomes a one-time cost rather than the recurring cost of hiring a consultant to do
the work for you.

But be careful, and always interview them before you hire them. What you are
looking for in a trainer is some detail on which tenders they have worked on before,
their understanding of what Government Assessment Inspectors like to see, and why
that is. Is the training they give simple? Does it take a long time? (Any longer than 4
days is probably suspect.) And do they provide any tools you can use that will make
the process run more smoothly?

Some companies hire a consultant to manage their bid and then attempt to get
trained by watching what they do and then copying them later. It’s a flawed strategy
because it costs far more than getting trained, and has the same effect as watching a
mechanic fix your car and then trying to do the same thing 6 months later. Don’t try
this on the brakes!

The second occasion I recommend clients to hire a consultant is when things go

wrong. Badly wrong. Remember that I always recommend that companies try to

Copyright  2010 Denis Thornton Evince Systems Ltd Page 14

sort out their own difficulties when they are developing tenders because of the
experience it brings. But if something appears to be a show-stopper then
intervention by an outside consultant can pay off.

But remember that they aren’t miracle workers. Calling them in at the last minute
won’t help anyone and will cost you more money and frustration. Developing a
Government Tender is all about anticipation and planning. If you do this early, you
will avoid most difficulties that companies run into. And the same applies to
intervention by a consultant. Try to be honest with yourself and anticipate that
you’re heading for the rocks, and make the call sooner rather than later. At least
that way the consultant will have a fighting chance to help you out.

So in summary, hesitate before you call in a consultant. Ask yourself if this really is
necessary. Can your company sort it out themselves? Is training the better strategy
over the long-term? And what kind of return are you going to get on your
investment?

The proposal workload is HUGE! How do I keep

13 track of all the information the Bid Team
generates?
Once you’ve decided who in the team is going to develop each document, and
answer each question, it’s inevitable that the work they produce is going to need
improvement.

This could be as simple as running a spell-check, but it’s rarely as easy as that. The
bid manager will have to read, review and comment on the document, and return it
to the author for changes. Perhaps better words could be used in one section, or a
particular aspect of your solution needs more emphasis.

In any case, each document, and each specification response is likely to need several
attempts to get it right. This is why a sensible versioning system is essential.

When you manage bids, it’s a good idea to create 2 folders on your PC desktop: one
called “Editing in Progress” and the other called “Editing Complete”. When the team
emails you their latest version, don’t get to work on it immediately because that can
interrupt whatever you’re working on at the time, so just download it into the
“Editing in Progress” folder.

When it’s time to review what’s been written, you can open that folder and start
work. Using Track Changes and Comments within Word, you can quickly review the
document and give the author enough guidance to go and attempt the next version.
You then place it into the “Editing Complete” folder to await emailing, and this helps
keep track of what You’ve done.

Copyright  2010 Denis Thornton Evince Systems Ltd Page 15

But you also need to keep track of what the Team is up to as well, and for this I
recommend you use Excel which enables you to list all the tasks, the internal
deadlines you’ve given to the team for completion, who the document leader and
his peer group are, and their progress.

Personally, I use a ‘traffic light’ system for progress where Red means ‘Not Begun’,
Amber means ‘In Progress’, and Green means ‘Completed’. If it’s a really big tender
with a lot of oversight, or I’m awaiting a Red Team exercise (see the next tip), I will
use light green for ‘Completed Draft’ and dark green for ‘Completed’.

You can then link all this to a dynamic ‘dashboard’ which shows – at a glance – how
well each person in the team is performing. This means that you can spot nice and
early who is having difficulty with a particular task and divert other people (usually
you!) to help sort out the document. This is typical, because some documents really
are much harder than others. For example, the Executive Summary is the most
important document, yet is relatively easy to create, whereas Risk Management
Plans and especially Transition Plans (where you lay out how the contract will be
activated, or transitioned from the existing contractor) can be very difficult.

Once you have the whole thing laid out in Excel, though, you can email updated
copies of this to the team which keeps them in the loop about progress and what
needs to be completed next.

This might seem like a lot of trouble to go to, but it saves days of time across the
whole tender development process. By emailing progress to the team using the
same sheet you have set up to manage the bid, you remove the need for lots of
time-consuming meetings.

By using a simple versioning system combined with a dynamic planning system

which you can create on Excel, and providing daily guidance and direction in a daily
conference call, you can keep track of any amount of information. Many bids fail
because they mistakenly let old or incomplete work through on the final tender and
all their work is for nothing. Don’t let this happen to you. Get a system in place,
stick to it, and punch out that proposal like a car on an assembly line!

What’s the best way to check my proposal to

14 make sure it’s the best it can be?
When I worked for the Government assessing multi-million dollar tenders, it never
ceased to amaze me the number of show-stopping mistakes that were made by
some companies. If I told you their names you would instantly recognize them and
be stunned that such top-flight companies could be so sloppy. I even saw one
proposal that arrived with random swear-words embedded in the text by a
disgruntled employee!

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So what’s the answer? Well, someone has to read every page to check for gross
errors, obviously. But there’s one big thing that any company – small or large –
should do to ensure that your proposal is the very best proposal that you can
produce at that time.

About 70 to 80 percent along your timeline to deadline, you need to program in a

Red-Team Exercise. A Red-Team Exercise is where you draft in senior management
if you’re in a big company, or even the Bid Team itself if you aren’t, to play the part
of Government Assessors for the day.

The aim of the Red Team exercise is to find and fix the flaws in the Bid, and
recommend improvements. It enables your work, assumptions, costs and solution to
be checked inside your company before your bid is sent off to the Government.

The reason why it should be programmed about 70-80% along the timeline is so that
your bid is mature enough to be coherently reviewed, but leave enough time to fix
problems when they are identified.

You’ll be surprised at what this exercise throws out, because up until you run it,
everyone has been working in their own little bubble. Even if you are a ‘one-man
band’, producing a tender by yourself, you can’t keep everything in your head at
once for very long.

This allows you (and higher management) the chance to look at the proposal from a
broad perspective, to challenge you to justify your claims and your costings. It is also
the best opportunity you have of finding out if documents that looked OK by
themselves, work together as a family of documents, as a sensible proposal. And by
having it about three-quarters the way through your tender development timeline,
you leave plenty of time to sort out any problems you have identified, and it is the
perfect springboard from which to write the final draft of a killer Executive Summary.

15 How do I create a Risk Management Plan?

Most Government Requests For Tenders ask for a Risk Management Plan, and risk
management itself has become something of a mini-industry in the world of
tendering for Government contracts. But it tends to be wrapped up in mystery and
made much more of than it needs to be.

Governments, just like most of us, need some reassurance that things probably
won’t go wrong, but if they do go wrong, they’ll be sorted out. That, - in a nutshell –
is risk management.

So your risk management plan takes 2 parts. The plan itself, and the risk register.
The Risk management Plan is where you lay out your philosophy regarding risk in
general and convince the Government that you are a ‘safe pair of hands’. Now ‘risk’

Copyright  2010 Denis Thornton Evince Systems Ltd Page 17

could mean health and safety; or it could mean commercial risk; and some
Government departments ask for separate plans for these. But your approach
should be the same for all the plans you write.

In the Risk Management Plan, describe your approach to risk, how you deal with
them, what you do when things go wrong, and how you will put things right in the
(hopefully unlikely) event that they do.

In the Risk Register, list each individual risk that you can identify, group it with other
risks in the same subject area, state what the implication of the risk is, give some
idea of the likelihood of the risk actually materialising and work out a ‘Risk Score’.
This then allows you to rank the risks in order of priority.

Next to that, you need to give a short summary of the Strategy you will use to
minimise the risk so that it is as unlikely as practicable to actually materialise.
Describe the actions you will carry out to mitigate the risk in support of the strategy.

Assign a deadline for the actions to be carried out and a Risk ‘Owner’. The owner is
the person who you have assigned responsibility to for carrying out the actions and
monitoring the risk. Finally you should write a short summary of a contingency plan
that will be used if the risk actually comes true and happens.

The best way to lay all this out is in Excel, my favourite versatile program. Because
the Risk Register is essentially a very large table, Excel is ideal for this and has the
added benefit that you can easily group similar risks together and rank them in
ascending or descending order of importance.

Once you’re finished, you can attach the Risk Register as an Annex to the Risk
Management Plan and include in the tender document set. The Risk Register can
then be used to manage the Contract Activation and Transition by the Project
Manager when you win the contract from the Government!

Copyright  2010 Denis Thornton Evince Systems Ltd Page 18

 What are the 10 things every proposal team
16 should do in the first 10 days?
When I first left the Government Assessment Team I worked with and started to
manage proposals myself, I turned to my best friend for advice who is now a Vice-
President for Hewlett-Packard, and has seen more than his fair share of tenders.

Here’s the advice he gave me. It’s been tested in anger and proven its worth many
times. It is as valid today as it was then, so if you do nothing else in this book except
this list, you’ll still do just fine:

1. Treat a bid like a project from day one.

2. Always aim to finish the proposal early. You will need the time.

3. Nail your Risk Register on day one. Review them daily.

4. Write an elevator pitch. We will win because......

5. Run a daily call with the key team members

6. Work out a price to win. If you’re bidding with partners, then NEVER let them
know what it is.

7. Make best friends with the finance lead.

8. Read the last pursuit/bid.

9. Organise regular peer reviews

10. Tell your wife/husband/girlfriend/boyfriend the last 2 weeks are hell!

My Team is spread out over half the country!

17 How can we produce a proposal and keep our
business running at the same time?
There’s no 2 ways about this: writing a proposal for a Government tender brings a
large workload that you and your company could do without. And that’s what leads
some people to make the cardinal sin of tendering, which is to Cut and Paste a
previous tender and other types of idiotic behavior that still wastes your time AND
ensures you lose!

But you can choose between a large workload or an impossible workload, and the
way to do this is: first, get organised and second, use technology.

Copyright  2010 Denis Thornton Evince Systems Ltd Page 19

Now I’ve talked about how to get organised on some of the other tips, and I won’t
labour the point here, so I’m going to talk a little bit about how to use some of the
technology choices you have.

So what? You’re probably aware of the many technology options available to you,
and you probably have a good mobile device like a blackberry or iPhone, but it’s how
you use what’s available to you that counts.

The one big thing you should do to make sure that everyone is ‘singing off the same
song-sheet’, is to hold a short conference call every morning, preferably as early as
possible in the day. Try to keep it under 15 minutes, and keep discussion confined to
what people need to achieve today, and review the actions from yesterday’s call.
Don’t be tempted to make this call only once a week, because it will last hours.

You can set the conference call up via Skype, or there are many providers that will
give you a number you can call to achieve the same result. Much as I love it, Skype
can be a bit flaky from time to time and if it isn’t working when you need it, this can
hold you up.

If the time of the conference call changes, just do a Skype SMS broadcast to let
everyone know about the new time. When you do the call every day, you’ll find that
you can blast through any issues really quickly, summarise it in an email and the
email then becomes everyone’s task sheet for the day.

Use Google Calendar to allow the team to ‘self-synchronize’. This means that
everyone can check when other people are available for meetings and plan
accordingly. That stops a lot of ‘phone tag’ and saves time.

Use Skype instant messaging rather than a telephone call. Instant messaging has the
advantage of the immediacy of a phonecall, but none of the time-wasting chat and
etiquette that phonecalls can have. But beware of time-wasters, because sometimes
instant-anything is a bad idea because it can distract you from your work. If this is
the case, then just switch Skype to ‘Away’ or ‘Do Not Disturb’ mode.

By leveraging technology you can be much more agile as a team and can run your
business today, while planning for future business via the proposal.

What’s the best way to write proposal

18 documents?
Most proposal documents can be written to roughly the same structure, and all of
them should use the same type of language. As with everything, there are always
exceptions to the rules, but once you understand how to write them in a particular
way – and why – you can use your own judgement to decide when those rules – or
really, guidelines – can be broken.

Copyright  2010 Denis Thornton Evince Systems Ltd Page 20

A good structure introduces the reader to what the document is going to be about,
lays out the various aspects of the document in a logical sequence, and summarises
it. Depending on what you want to do with the document you can either leave it at
that, or make a conclusion and then a recommendation for a particular course of
action.

Here’s a typical structure with the headings you should have in bold, and the
optional headings in italics.

Introduction

Aim

Main Body [this won’t be called ‘Main Body’, but could be called ‘The XYZ Ltd
Transition Plan’, for example.]

Section 1 – Heading
Section 2 – Heading
Section 3 – Heading
Summary
Conclusion
Recommendations

So first, decide what you want the document to achieve. If you want to describe a
particular facility, for example a factory, then you won’t need ‘Aim’, ‘Conclusion’ or
‘Recommendations’ as headings.

However, if you wanted to give the Client a choice of options, you might use ‘Aim’ to
state what you wanted to lay out for them in the document, and after detailing the
options in the main body and summarising the options in the summary, you could in
the ‘Conclusion’ point out that one of the options offered the best value for money
for the Government and the reason why. You might then choose to make this a
Recommendation.

There should be a reason that every document is written, and not just because the
Request for Tenders asks for it! Define what it is you want each document to
achieve and then write the document with that reason uppermost in your mind.

When it comes to the language you use, it should be third person impersonal. Do
not use words like ‘we’ or ‘us’, or even worse, ‘I’. The reason for this is that you will
end up saying it so many times the assessor will come away with the unconscious
impression that you are boasting, even when you aren’t! Unless you are very careful

Copyright  2010 Denis Thornton Evince Systems Ltd Page 21

you will have ‘we this’ and ‘we that’ in almost every sentence and it will sound like
it’s all about ‘Me, Me, Me’!

Instead, just be impersonal and write about ‘it’. ‘It was found that…’, ‘XYZ company
has developed new techniques that…’ and so on.

And there are two exceptions to this: The Executive Summary and the Cover Letter.
Both can use ‘we’, but I would still recommend that you are sparing in its use.

I own a small company. Is it worth my while

19 competing for Government Tenders with big
companies that have loads of resources?
(p.s. Read this if you’re in a BIG company!)
Never be afraid of bidding on a Government contract even if you think you’re trying
to ‘punch above your weight’.

Large companies have a very significant disadvantage compared to small companies

and it’s linked to similar issues as those discussed in Tip #8 on the ideal size for
teams. They’re just too big to communicate effectively and when communication
breaks down, smart people end up inside very dumb companies, very quickly indeed.

If you’re part of a big company then you’ll see this happen all the time. Whenever
the company gets above the hundred people or so mark, communication really bogs
down and a lot of decisions are made by committees unless there is very strong
leadership and a willing workforce.

People in big groups take less responsibility for their actions and perversely, this also
can lead them to taking bigger risks. This is why every so often you see examples of
spectacularly bad behavior in big groups: whether it is a banker who’s so over-
leveraged he brings his company down (e.g. Nick Leeson and the Barings bank crash),
or a rioter openly challenging law and order, people in big crowds can make really
dumb decisions.

So this provides a huge potential advantage for small companies, provided they play
it right by leveraging their uniqueness, attention to detail, or agility. Big companies,
meanwhile, can mask their potential for clod-footing it by recognising the pitfalls,
organising in such a way that they protect against them, and draw on their resources
to support them. When I was involved with the successful tender to win helicopter
search and rescue services, we did this successfully by setting our theme as “the
Local Team with Global Strength”, and everything we wrote reflected this.

Which goes to show that a big company that acts like a small company is a very
tenacious and cunning competitor, but fortunately for small companies, very few big
ones get it!

Copyright  2010 Denis Thornton Evince Systems Ltd Page 22

 What should my REAL aim be when developing a
20 proposal for a Government Tender?
You mean it isn’t to win the bid? No, of course you want to win the bid, but – and
this is perhaps the most important insight I have to share with you in this guide – you
want more than that, much more. And you can get it if you keep these simple
principles uppermost in your mind and the minds of your team as you develop your
proposal.

Remember that if there’s one thing worse than losing out on a contract, it’s losing it
when you have held it for years and you’ve grown accustomed to the regular
cashflow that it brings in.

So you need to write your tender – not with the short term view of winning the bid –
but with the long-term view of winning it when it comes up for renewal, a few years
down the line, as all of them do.

You need to impress the Government so much that even when they’re forced to re-
tender by law, they secretly want you to win it again.

That means that: you must persuade them in your proposal that you have got what it
takes to do what they want; you have then got to run a flawless transition or
activation period – often the most difficult phase of all; and you must continue to
impress the Government as you reach the ‘steady-state’ point where you are fully up
and running and producing the product or service that they want. In other words,
you need to:

Win The Bid

Win The Transition
Win The Delivery
If, before you put a single pen to paper on any of the bid documents, you write
everything with this long-term strategy in mind, it will guide your decisions, your
work and your proposal in the right direction. There’ll be no talk of “crossing that
bridge when we come to it”, or recriminations when the company has to deliver
something they can’t, or the embarrassment of getting kicked off the contract to
make way for the company who came second (but didn’t fib).

You’ll be there, waving at the top of the mountain. And I’ll be cheering for you!

Good luck with all your tendering, and I promise you – if you remember
nothing but this last, most important insider secret – you’ll be better
prepared, produce better tenders, and win more contracts than 99% of
your competitors!

Copyright  2010 Denis Thornton Evince Systems Ltd Page 23

About Our Company:

I hope that you’ve found this series of insider secrets useful. If you have
any questions that you’d like answered then please get in touch with
me, Denis Thornton, at: Denis.Thornton@EvinceSystem.com, or call me
in the office on +44 121 233 5155.

Remember that while I live in Ireland, I operate internationally and have

worked with companies from the following countries:

Ireland Byte Surgery

CHC Ireland

United Kingdom Thales

General Dynamics
BAE Systems
Logica
ITT
EDS
Hewlett Packard
Inzpire
UK Ministry of Defence

United States Northrop Grumman

Lockheed Martin

Israel Elbit Systems

Switzerland RUAG Aviation

As well as being a fully qualified commercial helicopter pilot, I have

worked as a Public Procurement Specialist in both Government and
Industry since 2001.

“I worked with Denis on the CHC Irish Bid. He is meticulous in his work. He has great
organization skills. His commitment and dedication to the entire bid process was
simply superb. He was a great asset to the team. He pulled the entire bid together
and coordinated effectively with all the team members.”
Devang Bhandari, Director (Restructuring), Alvarez and Marsal

Copyright  2010 Denis Thornton Evince Systems Ltd Page 24

“Denis is an exceptionally effective consultant who worked with Inzpire on a major
and successful project for a large international defence contractor. Denis's input into
this project was very significant indeed. Denis is highly insightful, commercially very
astute, and the quality of his work is always excellent. Denis is very personable and a
pleasure to have on the team. Inzpire would definitely use Denis again. I highly
recommend him.”
Hugh Griffiths, CEO Inzpire Ltd.

Denis is a very capable leader who delivered on his commitments to me time and
time again. He built very effective teams and prioritized effectively. I would hire Denis
tomorrow.”
Howard Hughes, Ministry Of Defence

Get In Touch Today. I Can Deliver…

Seminars

Bid Management

Bid Management Training

Team Training

Time Management Training

Consultancy

And our unique and proven tender winning development system:

The Evince Tender Development System v2.0

For more information, please call 0121 233 5155, or email info@EvinceSystem.com,
or visit www.EvinceSystem.Com to find out more.

Win The Bid

Win The Transition
Win The Delivery

Copyright  2010 Denis Thornton Evince Systems Ltd Page 25

Copyright  2010 Denis Thornton Evince Systems Ltd
Copyright  2010 Denis Thornton Evince Systems Ltd