Case studies
A South Yorkshire digital agency wanted a share of public sector work but had no idea how to compete for it. I transferred what I know about how government buys, and we built a tender approach and a set of reusable pitch templates the agency could run without me. It went from watching public contracts go past to bidding for them properly, on its own, winning £120k of public sector work with the cost of each bid falling and staying down.
Public sector work is attractive to an agency for the same reasons it is hard to win. The contracts are substantial, the clients pay, and the relationships last.
But the route in looks nothing like commercial new business. There are portals and frameworks, compliance questions that can disqualify you before anyone reads your ideas, and scoring criteria that reward a well-structured answer over a beautiful one.
The agency had commercial pitching down, but every government tender felt like starting from scratch in a foreign language, and the days it would take to bid blind were days it could not spare on a probable loss.
This engagement was knowledge transfer, not a rescue. I have spent years around public sector procurement from both sides of the table, including running tenders as the buyer, so I knew what the people scoring these bids are looking for and, just as usefully, what gets a bid quietly binned.
I worked with the team on how public sector tendering really operates: how to find and qualify opportunities so effort only goes into winnable bids, how to read a specification and its scoring weights before deciding to compete, and how to structure a response so every mark available is actually claimed.
Then we turned that into assets rather than memories, building a set of reusable pitch templates for government opportunities, so the compliance boilerplate, the evidence sections and the response structure were built once and adapted each time.
£120k of public sector contract value, won by an agency that had never bid for any. There is no win rate to put alongside it, and I would rather say so than dress it up.
The more durable result is that what the agency got was a capability. It could qualify a public tender in hours rather than agonising for days, produce a compliant and properly structured bid without buying outside help each time, and reuse the templates on every opportunity that followed. The cost of each bid fell and stayed down, which is what decides whether public sector work is worth pursuing at all.
Agencies treat public sector tendering as a dark art and either avoid it or pay specialists indefinitely. It is not a dark art, it is a process, and processes can be learned. Buying the capability once, and owning it, beats renting it forever. That is the same principle I apply in every engagement: the job is finished when the team no longer needs me.
Building that capability inside a team is capability development. On running the pitch itself, see a pitch day is for probing the gaps.
Yes. It is not a dark art, it is a process: portals and frameworks, compliance questions that disqualify you before anyone reads your ideas, and scoring criteria that reward a well-structured answer over a beautiful one. Processes can be learned, and this one was.
A set of reusable pitch templates for government opportunities, so the compliance boilerplate, the evidence sections and the response structure were built once and adapted each time rather than rewritten from nothing at every deadline.
Because you would be renting the capability forever. Buying it once and owning it means the agency can qualify a tender in hours rather than days, and the cost of every bid after that stays down.
Most clients begin with a conversation. No pitch, no hard sell.
Just a straightforward discussion about where you are and whether I can help.
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