Councils spend billions of pounds each year on a huge range of goods and services.
They issue over a thousand opportunities a week across short-term and long-term contracts.
In doing so they offer regular, reliable income to businesses with the added benefit of paying promptly.
This all means that becoming a supplier to them can create growth for your business, however getting started can seem daunting.
If you’re not sure where to start, then here’s 5 steps you can take straight away!
Register for alerts on national portals
First steps are to register your business with the following websites. These portals are where many opportunities are advertised. Getting used to scanning them regularly will give you a great idea of the type and scale of works that might be suitable.
www.contractsfinder.service.gov.uk
www.publiccontractsscotland.gov.uk
Look for opportunities where your business can operate
If your business can operate in certain locations, then you might like to pick a council based on their location or other relevant factors. Once you have identified them you can use their website to find the portal they use – this is the website their opportunities are advertised on and managed through.
This will usually be shown on their website under “procurement” or “how to do business with us”. Once you’ve found their portal you can register as a supplier and sign up to receive alerts directly from them.
Practice completing them
Once you have followed the first two steps you will have started to see opportunities being advertised that your business could bid for. The next crucial step is to download some tender documents for opportunities that are suitable for you and have a practice completing them.
This will help you to identify if you have any gaps in your processes or content, and if so fill them (This is called a gap analysis). It will also help you start to build a bank of content that could be used in future bids.
This will mean that you are ready to go the moment the perfect tender for you lands and the clock starts counting down to the deadline.
I hope you found this useful!
Registering your business with portals and building in regular time to look for suitable opportunities can help you to build a picture of the size and scale available to you.
