"We was robbed" seemed to be the general opinion on the lack of success of the bid to host the World Cup 2018. There were also comments about the unfairness of producing the bid with the best marks but not getting the job, and how the voting process should be changed, and the relative waste of spending money on producing materials as requested, when Britain was out of the process after the first bidding round. It was all wrong and frightfully unfair!
You would think a politician would understand the vagaries of a voting system, but I doubt our Prime Minister, Prince William or David Beckham have had much experience in the last three years of public tendering processes. This is why I say "welcome to my world!"
There are very few projects nowadays that are offered to external organisations (builders, consultants, advertising agencies to name a few) without some sort of tendering process, and while not of the scale of a World Cup bid, actually for a micro-enterprise like Plantagenet Consulting, the tendering process is a major expense. First there is finding out about the tendering opportunity - BIS kindly provides the Supply 2 Gov website, but at about £250 per year subscription for anything other than the most basic view, this is not cheap (other portals are available I hasten to add).
Relevant opportunities are either one off contracts or framework agreements. For a business the size of Plantagenet Consulting, you can forget framework agreements - you can never get beyond the tickbox element for the various policies you have to have, as the fact that you have fewer than 5 employees, so you don't need them, is not a valid excuse in general.
So you are looking at an invitation to tender for a single contract. If you are lucky, the potential client does not have a tendering portal such as Bravosolutions (again other portals are available) to battle against, and does not want a tender in hard copy (don't get me started on the challenges of the Mail system and courriers), but will accept an e-mail document.
In order to produce a good tender, that meets the requirements of the potential client and represents you well, I estimate the minimum time required is 2 days, and the maximum viable time is two weeks, depending on the potential value of the project. For a micro business that is between 2 and 10 days, and for an individual consultant, allowing for admin and such things we reckon there are 15 billable days in a month, but for a bigger project, you can see that every extra day is an opportunity cost of whatever your day rate happens to be.
If you are incredibly lucky, you get the project and away you go. If you are "lucky" you are shortlisted, and get to go to all the additional expense of attending a beauty parade with a presentation of how you and yours would best meet the customer's needs. You are never recompensed for attending these parades, even if it becomes clear that you are only making up numbers. Sometimes your pitch wins, sometimes it doesn't. And in at least 50% of cases, your excellent tender will be rejected (and realistically it will often be a higher per cent of cases), and sometimes you will get useful feedback and sometimes you won't. If you do, it must be valued and pondered over.
Such is the world of the consultant, occasional highs leading to valuable work and rewarding new relationships, but so often counting the not inconsiderable cost of being one of those who didn't win. Often as well, you feel that actually you did a good job, and deserved a better hearing, but as with the World Cup bid, it just didn't happen.
Mr Cameron, if you have read this, consider the amount of wasted effort and money in ALL unsuccessful bids around the country in a single year. Your bid's failure was a bit more public than most, but you expect public suppliers to go through that self same process and beauty pagent, and invest proportionate costs. In your failure, you found a peer group to relate to!
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