As all small business owners will know, SMEs tend to operate on finer margins and sharper knife edges than their larger counterparts. Challenges, such as new competitors and economic uncertainty, can accumulate to make SMEs feel the force of external factors more intensely.
Working with the public sector can be a real game-changer for SMEs. Associated with long-term stability and excellent payment terms, public tenders can help to give SMEs the breathing room they need to expand their business rapidly, and securely.
Traditionally, getting access to public tenders comes with its own set of challenges for SMEs. In the UK alone, there are over 3600 tender portals that hold the information for live government contracts. Of this 3600, not one includes smart matching – a lot of them don’t even have all of the same information available, and generally these sites just aren’t user friendly, especially for SMEs who haven’t got the resources to dedicate team members to manually find public tenders.
However, like so many sectors, technology is revolutionising these pain points for SMEs, ensuring that small business owners can start to work smarter, rather than work harder.
The smart tender-matching solution
OPPORTUNI, a tech start-up based out of north east England, has developed a brilliant but simple solution that gives SMEs the fastest and easiest access to public sector tenders around. Dubbed the ‘tinder-for-tenders’, the solution smart matches SMEs with the most relevant contracts out there, sending them directly to your inbox.
With OPPORTUNI, the process becomes much shorter and much smarter. As a business owner, all you have to do is sign up on the website, complete your details and OPPORTUNI’s smart robots do the rest. In fact, OPPORTUNI’s smart robots are so smart that not only will they send the most relevant contracts to you, they send you the ones that you’re most likely to win based on your profile. The time and resource that small businesses can save here is priceless, with no wasted effort researching or bidding on the wrong tenders.
In a time when resource and money can be scarce for SMEs, it’s important for all businesses to be cautious about how they spend their time and hard-earned money. Luckily, OPPORTUNI has provided the perfect solution for this.
Building back better through local business
Since their inception in March 2020 (just 10 days before the first UK lockdown), OPPORTUNI has evolved the landscape of public tender bidding across the UK and beyond. Within these 18 months or so, OPPORTUNI has helped SMEs to source and win over £400m worth of government contracts, with this staggering number growing by the day.
CEO of OPPORTUNI, Tim Ward, has 15 years of bid writing experience under his belt, regularly advises the UK government on procurement reform, and is regarded as one of the world’s leading bid experts.
When asked about his motivation for the new solution, Tim said: “Our mission is to find great SMEs who should be winning government contracts, and ultimately make it easier for them to find these contracts and win them. These are the companies who should be fixing the roads, providing the cleaning services for our local hospitals and schools, securing our government buildings and civic centres, and so much more.
“We’re passionate about smaller, local businesses winning these contracts because of the value it has for the businesses themselves, but also because of the amazing effect it has on communities more widely. By helping to provide easy access to stable avenues of work, it can help to reinvigorate local communities, support small businesses to gain the stability they need for long-term growth and security, and help business owners to grow and provide employment opportunities for their local communities.”
You don’t need an MP in your contacts to win a government contract
At its very core, OPPORTUNI believes that any business, no matter their size or who they know, should have the same access to bidding for public sector work as anyone else. For a long time, the procurement landscape has been subject to bias and ‘jobs for the boys’, but OPPORTUNI is rapidly breaking these barriers down.
With the click of a button, businesses can get access to the best tenders in their area, as well as all the accompanying documentation and any other information required for the tender process. If you’re keen to write the bid yourself, then great: but if not, OPPORTUNI has a team of expert bid writers on hand to write a compelling and winning bid.
Communicate PLC is a small IT, telecoms, and cybersecurity business based in the North East. Regular clients of OPPORTUNI, when asked about the solution they said: “When introduced to the concept, we knew that OPPORTUNI had the solution we’d been looking for since tendering began. it has been a revelation for the way we search for opportunities, as those relevant now come directly to us.”
If working smarter is something you or your business can benefit from, then sign up on the website below and start your 14-day free trial: we don’t think you’ll regret it.
