Public tenders: reading the file before deciding to bid
Published on August 13, 2026
Four points in the tender documents will tell you, in half an hour, whether a bid has a chance. Firms that skip them bid at a loss.
Answering a tender costs between 40 and 120 hours depending on the size of the lot. A firm that bids for everything and wins one file in twelve is losing money on its sales function, even when the job it wins is profitable.
The first thing to read is the weighting. A contract scored 70% price and 30% technical does not reward the same firm as one scored 50/50, and a business that cannot be the cheapest has no business bidding for the first.
The second is the price revision clause. On an eighteen-month job with no revision formula, the contractor carries the steel and cement risk alone. That is a bet, and it should be taken knowingly rather than discovered in month six.
The third is the payment schedule, together with the payment delay actually observed with this client, which is not the one written down. The fourth is the list of deliverables, because that is where the studies the file quietly assigns to the contractor are hiding, unnamed in the price.
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