Your first 90 days running tenders

Spend your first two weeks taking inventory and changing nothing, your next month fixing coverage and qualification, and your final six weeks building a routine that runs while you are away. That order is deliberate, because coverage and qualification are the two changes that produce a measurable difference inside one quarter.

The temptation in week one is to repair whatever offends you most, usually the proposal documents. Resist it. The quickest way to lose credibility is to break a working alert while improving a template.

The ninety day plan on one page

The ninety days, by phase and checkpoint

Days 1 to 14: find out what already exists

Two weeks, no changes. You are describing the current state accurately enough to defend it later, because once you start improving things the old numbers become both unavailable and unbelievable.

Start with the submission record: every tender submitted in the last 24 months, with buyer, value, date, outcome and the reason given for each loss. Nobody holds this in one place, so rebuild it from the bid folder, the CRM and finance.

Then work out the real win rate, twice: bids won divided by bids submitted over a stated period, usually the last twelve months, and value won divided by the value of everything you bid, the capture ratio. A healthy count-based rate alongside a much lower capture ratio means you win the small work and lose the competitions that matter. Check which measures are worth reporting first.

Next, the sources: which portals are monitored, by whom, on whose login. The honest answer is usually shorter than the official one. In the EU it means above-threshold notices on TED plus national portals, in the UK Find a Tender and Contracts Finder, in the US federal opportunities on SAM.gov plus state and local systems. Buyer-side portals such as Delta, In-tend, Jaggaer and Proactis hold separate registrations.

Then the alerts. Which CPV codes, or NAICS, PSC and UNSPSC codes, are the rules built on, who chose them, and when were they last edited? Which inbox do they land in, and does a human open it?

Finally, registrations and certificates, each with an expiry date beside it. A SAM.gov entity registration must be renewed at least every 12 months, and the twelve-character Unique Entity ID replaced the DUNS number on 4 April 2022, so a file still quoting a DUNS number tells you how long ago anyone checked. UK suppliers hold core information on the Central Digital Platform, live since 24 February 2025 under the Procurement Act 2023, where buyers now issue a Procurement Specific Questionnaire rather than the old Standard Selection Questionnaire. The EU bid-time equivalent is the European Single Procurement Document, Part III covering exclusion grounds and Part IV selection criteria. Cyber Essentials lasts 12 months from award, while ISO 9001 and ISO 27001 certificates run a three-year cycle with annual surveillance audits, so a certificate can be in date while the audit keeping it valid is overdue.

What to look for in the loss record

Somewhere in that list sits the finding that defines your first quarter: bids submitted with no realistic chance. Four markers identify them:

• Disqualified for a missing document or an unmet selection criterion, so a compliance failure rather than a competition
• Scored below the quality threshold, so never in contention at any price
• Sent to a buyer nobody had spoken to, for work an incumbent had held for years
• Started with fewer working days than the submission needed

In the EU a contract award notice normally records the value awarded and how many tenders were received, and under Article 50 of Directive 2014/24/EU it must be sent within 30 days of the contract being concluded, so you can check whether your price was ever in range. Reading a run of them shows who actually wins the work you bid for. US federal contractors should also pull their CPARS evaluations, where the contractor has 14 calendar days from notification to comment under FAR 42.1503. Check what the past performance record says before blaming the writing.

Then cost it on your own numbers. For each losing bid in the last twelve months, count the person-days spent by everyone who touched it and multiply by your loaded day rate. The subtotal for bids carrying one of the four markers is the budget you are about to redirect.

Days 15 to 45: fix coverage and qualification first

Both produce fast visible change because neither depends on a buyer deciding anything.

Coverage first. Take the previous two quarters of award notices in your sector, geography and size band, then check each against your own records to see whether you saw it while it was open. The procedure for measuring what your alerts missed runs about ninety minutes and produces a coverage rate and a count of misses by cause.

Fix the largest cause, and only the largest. If misses cluster on classification, widen the codes. If they cluster on wording, your keyword strategy is the problem and adding portals will not help. If they cluster on portals you do not watch, check whether the missing work sits below the EU thresholds that decide what reaches TED at all: from 1 January 2026, under Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2025/2152, EUR 5,404,000 for works, EUR 140,000 for central government supplies and services, and EUR 216,000 for sub-central authorities. Below those figures publication follows national and local rules, which is where quiet coverage holes live. Rewrite the rules once, keep the old version, then adopt a quarterly routine for alert hygiene.

Qualification second. The goal is one written page saying which opportunities you bid and who decides, not a governance process. Ten minutes, one named decider, applied before anyone opens the specification, recorded even when the answer is yes. A ten minute bid/no-bid decision is enough, and writing down the reason is what lets you audit your own judgement later.

Days 46 to 90: build the routine and the evidence library

A routine that only works when you are at your desk is not a routine. Set a timeboxed daily pass over the portals and the alert inbox, write the steps down in the order you do them, then have someone else run it while you watch. The daily portal round, timeboxed is the shape to copy, and the test is whether it holds through a fortnight's absence. Naming a deputy and writing their cover for holidays is a day 60 job, because the first unplanned absence will not wait.

The qualification log is a spreadsheet: date, opportunity, buyer, decision, one-line reason, decider. Review it monthly against outcomes; within two quarters it shows which reasons for declining were sound and which were nerves.

The evidence library is not a rewritten set of answers. It is the raw material every submission demands and nobody can find: certificates and insurance documents with expiry dates, signed policies, audited accounts, referees who have agreed to be named, CVs in one format, case studies carrying actual numbers. Build it from the last five tenders you responded to, and give every item an owner and a review date.

Then choose one bid under the new rule and run it through the new library. That submission counts for more at day 90 than anything you write about the changes.

What to measure from day one

Write the baseline down by day 10 and date it. Six measures are enough:

• Qualified opportunities seen per month
• Coverage rate, once the first audit gives you one
• Bids submitted in the last twelve months, and bids won
• Win rate by number, and capture ratio by value
• Bid/no-bid ratio, meaning how many opportunities you declined
• Median days between publication and your internal decision

Watch the last one weekly, because everything upstream of a buyer's decision responds within days while win rate cannot move for months.

What not to touch in your first quarter

Rewriting the boilerplate library is the classic wasted quarter. It absorbs weeks, produces nothing anyone outside the bid team can see, and has to be redone once you know which questions recur and which old answers scored well. You cannot know either in month one.

Three other things to leave alone. Do not change the CRM or buy software before you have evidence about the gap. Do not cancel a subscription before the coverage audit tells you what it catches. Do not reopen who approves a bid until you have a qualification rule worth having authority over.

How to report progress at 30, 60 and 90 days

Win rate is a lagging indicator, and the lag is structural. A tender you first see in month two may not close until month four, after which a standstill period runs before signature: at least 8 working days from publication of the contract award notice under the UK Procurement Act 2023, and at least 10 calendar days under the EU remedies rules where the award decision is sent electronically.

At day 30, report the inventory on one page: what exists, what has expired, what the real win rate has been, and the coverage claim you are about to test. Bring no recommendations yet, or exactly one.

At day 60, report the coverage rate, the misses by cause as counts, the alert changes you made, and how many decisions the qualification rule has taken. This is where the finding about unwinnable bids belongs, with the cost attached.

At day 90, put the day 10 baseline and the current value side by side, name the bid chosen under the new rule, and say which numbers cannot have moved yet.

Adjusting the plan for a one-person operation

If you are the whole function, the interviews collapse into an afternoon because you are the source. Write the qualification rule for yourself anyway, since its real job is protecting you from the bid you fancy on a Friday afternoon. Cut daily monitoring to twenty minutes, narrow your coverage deliberately rather than accidentally, and give one colleague read access to the alert inbox with a page saying what to forward.

Joining an existing team inverts the emphasis. Spend the full fourteen days on interviews and change nothing you have not watched someone do. Ask each person what they believe their job is during a tender, because the gaps between the answers are where work goes missing. Run the first coverage audit alongside the person whose alerts you are auditing, or the number gets read as an accusation.

Common questions

How long before a new bid manager should be winning work?

Longer than ninety days in most public-sector markets, because of the gap between publication and award. Plan for your first self-selected bid to be submitted around day 60 to 90 and for the result to land after day 90, since a standstill of at least 8 working days in the UK, or 10 calendar days under the EU remedies rules, follows the award decision.

What should I fix first if I only have time for one thing?

Coverage. Qualification improves the yield of the opportunities you see, but coverage decides whether you see them at all, and a tender you never saw leaves no trace in your pipeline. Run a coverage audit, fix the single largest cause of misses, and leave the rest until that number moves.

How do I calculate a win rate when nobody has been tracking it?

Rebuild it from two records kept for other reasons: the submission folder or portal history for what went out, and finance records of contract starts for what came back. Count only bids actually submitted, exclude anything withdrawn before the deadline, and state the period, normally the last twelve months. Publish the count-based rate and the capture ratio together, because a large gap between them is itself a finding.

What if the firm has never bid for public work at all?

Then days 1 to 14 become registration work rather than archaeology. Establish the identifiers your markets require, such as a SAM.gov entity registration in the US or Central Digital Platform supplier information in the UK, and collect certificates, accounts and insurance documents from the start. Your first coverage audit measures published opportunity against nothing, so treat it as market sizing.