Bid Writing For Small Business Owners?

The aim of this article is a help the reader to discern whether Bid Writing is a role that small business owners are able to take on themselves or whether it is a process that is best outsourced to expert, professional Bid Writers.

After all, Bid Writing is a difficult and time consuming process that requires a thorough knowledge of the industry that is being written for, the business itself, a clear, concise and engaging writing style and excellent organisation skills. Before any kind of Bid Writing activity can begin, the small business owner come Bid Writer or the actual Bid Writer themself, must prepare all of the documents that need to be included as part of the Tender Document. There is absolutely no point in submitting a Tender all prerequisite documents and policies are not complete, up-to-date and in place.

The Best Approach To Bid Writing

So Bid Writing requires both an objective, conscientious approach to make sure that “all of the boxes are ticked” as well as a creative, engaging style of writing. Basically, the end product must meet all of the criteria and stand out from the rest of the Tender Documents that the reviewer is appraising. This is what will make the difference between a Tender Document and a winning Tender. There are no prizes for coming second! Your company either wins the Tender or it doesn’t!

How Small Business Owners Can Write Bids

So let’s get to the point of this article – how the small business owner can write Bids like a professional Bid Writer. Well, I take the stance that Bid Writers do their job day in day out and are the best people for the job. And this is true! Sure, a small business owner (assuming that the business isn’t a Bid Writing Services company) cannot be expected to write and put together a Bid Document as well as an expert who write Bids for a living. And if the could, I think that the small business owner’s other tasks would suffer as a result of this over-representation of their time being spent on Bid Writing activities.

Specialise! Don’t Be A Jack Of All Trades But Master Of None!

The whole point of being in business is to specialise and, therefore, spend most of your time doing what you are good at because you can do it better and more quickly than anyone else. Then you can pay others to do what they are good at and so on. However, I do believe that, despite this realisation, most people can learn to complete tasks to the best of their ability, to a reasonable and often sufficient level of quality (given the correct training/learning). So bearing this in mind, I think that if competition for a Tender is relatively average then a small business owner might be able to write a suitably substantial Tender Document with a reasonably good chance of winning. Many would argue that as the number of and quality of the competition for a given Tendering opportunity increases so does the likelihood of a “reasonably average” Tender failing to meet the mark.

It stands to reason that the best Tendering opportunities have more competition. Also, let’s assume that if an opportunity to Tender is less competitive then this is likely to be either because the opportunity requires a very specialised skillset which is under-represented in the marketplace or because the contract is relatively low value. Also, if the small business owner writes his or her own Tender Document for a high competition opportunity then they are more likely to be up against the offerings of professional Bid Writers. Afterall, when do small business owners finally decide to hire a professional Bid Writer? The answer to this is quite clear – when that opportunity comes up for them which is truly unmissable, highly lucrative and potentially company transforming! So don’t try to be a Jack Of All Trades and outsource your Bid Writing. If you find that your company requires lots of Tenders to be produced then hire a Bid Writing Training Consulting to provide professional, expert training inhouse.