Bid or no bid: is that tender worth your time?

A serious response to a public-sector ITT swallows several working days: reading the pack, building a price, writing method statements, chasing references and certificates. For a small firm that time comes out of evenings or out of billable work, so the most valuable bidding skill is knowing when to stop. Deciding not to bid, quickly and for stated reasons, is what funds the effort on the tenders you can actually win. Here is a structured way to make that call.

First: the eligibility killers

Check these before reading anything else, because any one of them ends the conversation:

• Mandatory accreditations. SSIP membership (CHAS, SafeContractor, Constructionline or similar) is near-universal for site-based work; contracts that touch personal data commonly require Cyber Essentials; some buyers add ISO standards. If a mandatory item is missing and cannot realistically be obtained before the deadline, it is a no.
• Insurance levels. Public liability at £5m or £10m is a common ask, with professional indemnity on advisory work. Confirm your broker can meet the level before you spend a day writing.
• Financial thresholds. Turnover requirements, sometimes up to twice the annual contract value. There is a matching sanity check in the other direction: a contract worth more than roughly half your turnover concentrates a lot of your business in one client, and buyers will probe whether you can absorb it.
• Certifications for the scope. DBS-checked staff for schools and care settings, licences and registrations for regulated work, security clearances on some government contracts.

Keep the list of near-misses. An accreditation that ruled you out twice this year is telling you what to get before the next cycle.

Then: can you actually deliver it?

• Geography. If the work needs a physical presence, map the sites against your base. Travel time erodes margins quietly, and a distant contract at a keen price is a slow way to lose money. If your service is deliverable remotely, this test falls away.
• Capacity. Could you start on day one without wrecking existing contracts? Count the people, the kit and the parallel commitments, not the best week.
• TUPE. If the pack includes a staff transfer list, the incumbent's workforce becomes your cost base. If absorbing those salaries and terms does not work at a competitive price, better to know in hour one.
• Kit, systems and licences. A specification demanding equipment, software or premises you would have to buy is only a yes if the contract term pays for the purchase with margin left over.

Then: can you win it?

Deliverable and winnable are different questions.

• The incumbent. Award notices on Contracts Finder and Find a Tender tell you who holds the work now. A long-standing incumbent with no public signs of trouble is beatable, but your bid needs a reason the buyer should switch, and "we are cheaper" is the weakest one available. Re-lets where the incumbent has visibly struggled, or where the contract has been re-lotted into smaller pieces, are far better odds.
• Evaluation fit. Read the weightings against your strengths. Price-heavy evaluations favour scale and thin margins; quality-heavy ones favour firms that can evidence delivery, monitoring and relevant experience. Bid where the scoring rewards what you are actually good at.
• Social value weighting. If it carries 15 or 20 per cent and you have nothing prepared, you are conceding a fifth of the marks to anyone who has.
• Your evidence. Top quality scores need relevant contract examples and references. If your best example is half the size of this contract, expect the evaluator to notice, and consider whether a smaller lot is the smarter target.

The maths of bidding

Most bids do not win, so the return on bidding comes from picking the right ones. Every bid you submit on a tender you were never likely to win lowers the return on all the others. Two disciplined bids a quarter, on contracts that fit, will outperform six scattergun ones, and the disciplined bids get better each cycle because feedback from near-misses is specific enough to act on.

A simple scorecard keeps the decision honest. Score the tender out of five on each of: eligibility, geography, capacity, incumbent position, evaluation fit and evidence. Set yourself a floor before you look at any individual tender, and hold to it. The point of writing the rules down in advance is that a shiny contract value stops overriding them.

Make it a routine

The go or no-go call gets fast with repetition: the killers first, the delivery test second, the winnability test third, and a written one-line reason for every no. Firms that log their no-bids build something valuable almost by accident, a map of which buyers, lot sizes and evaluation styles actually suit them. That map, more than any writing technique, is what turns tendering from a lottery into a pipeline.