Free guide · 15 pages · no sign-up
The SME’s guide to winning public-sector contracts
UK public bodies buy roughly £300 billion a year, and the law generally makes them advertise it. Some of that work has your name on it - the job is finding it, then bidding well. This free guide is how. A practical read, written for time-poor small and medium-sized firms.
What’s inside
The size of the prize
UK public bodies buy roughly £300 billion a year, and the law generally makes them advertise it. A good chunk of it suits a small or medium-sized firm.
Why now
Government aims to direct around a third of public spending to SMEs, and the Procurement Act 2023 is built to make public buying more open and fairer to newcomers.
The five things that make it hard - and the fix for each
The work is scattered, the language is unfamiliar, there are eligibility gates, the scoring is opaque, and the admin is heavy. None of it is beyond an SME.
The 10-point playbook
From watching all the right portals at once, to getting onto frameworks and dynamic markets, to writing to the scoresheet and making social value specific and measurable.
The playbook: 10 things an SME can do to win more
- 1Look in all the right places
- 2Get registered and build a bid library
- 3Get onto frameworks and dynamic markets
- 4Be ruthless about bid or no-bid
- 5Read the whole tender before you write a word
- 6Use your clarification questions
- 7Know how you will be judged: most advantageous tender
- 8Write to the scoresheet
- 9Make social value specific and measurable
- 10Mind the admin, stay compliant, and learn from every result
Or let BidSquirrel do the heavy lifting
The guide is the playbook. BidSquirrel is the tool that runs it for you: every major British public-sector source scanned daily - including the sub-£30,000 council work most tools skip - each opportunity scored to your business with the reasoning written down, an eligibility check, and guided bid writing that drafts each answer with you, not for you.
No promise of a guaranteed win. The honest promise is better decisions, better-built bids, and a lot of time saved.