How we judge a tender

Most tender alerts are a list. A list is not intelligence — the notices are free and public, and anyone can subscribe to them. What costs a contractor money is the three weeks spent writing a submission that was never winnable.

So every opportunity here gets the same five reads, and one of three verdicts. Roughly a third of what we publish carries a No bid, which is the point.

Gate

The hard disqualifiers, first, because they decide whether anything else matters. Turnover thresholds — buyers commonly want two to three times the annual contract value. Insurance levels. Accreditations: sector qualifications, ISO certification, safety scheme membership. Years of filed accounts. Firms routinely discover these after committing a week to the quality responses.

We have written this read up as a free two-page worksheet you can run against your own notices: the 20-minute gate check.

Fit

What size and shape of contractor actually wins this. Headcount, own plant, whether you need traffic management in house, how far the geography stretches. A framework written for a national contractor and a single scheme suited to a ten-person firm look identical in a notice list.

Scoring

Where the marks sit. The price and quality split, whether social value carries real weight, and whether there are pass or fail methodology sections that end your bid regardless of everything else. This decides whether good writing can move you up the ranking at all, or whether the result is settled by your rates.

Price

Whether the budget is realistic for the scope and the term. This is the read we take most seriously, because winning badly is worse than losing. A rate that looks competitive at tender is a rate you are still delivering at in year three, against a risk profile that has moved. The firms that walk away from a number they cannot deliver at keep their money.

Verdict

One sentence, and one of three marks. Bid — worth your time. Bid if — worth it only if the named condition is true of your business. No bid — leave it, and here is why.

Who writes it

DCD & Sons. Commercial management and bid writing for contractors in utilities, streetworks, telecoms, civils and renewables, built on years in the sector before the firm was formed — including a £24m NEC4 term service contract won and run, framework submissions and public sector procurement. We write bids for a living, which is why the assessment is free: some of the people who read it will want the submission written properly, and those are the right clients.

This is opinion, not procurement advice. Read the notice and the tender documents before you commit.