Thanks you so much for conducting the workshop on tender writing yesterday.  Even though the three of us have written many tenders before, it was truly enlightening to hear your comments on the do’s and don’ts of tender writing and your review on one of our unsuccessful tenders.  We do get caught up using the same information in our tenders repeatedly and now we appreciate the need to tailor our responses, explain every statement more thoroughly and use more “tender speak” as opposed to using “marketing speak”. Your experience from being both on government assessment panels and many years of reviewing and writing tenders for government was exactly the knowledge we sought - your words of wisdom and feedback were invaluable and will help us immensely with how we approach and write our tenders in future.

Hi Maurice, You are on a roll my friend. I am extremely pleased to advise that VERTO was awarded the contract for ParentsNext for both the Central West and North Coast Employment regions (2 of the 4 we bid for). This represents significant growth for VERTO. Thank you for your expertise and support and I look forward to working with you again.

I think we all have our superpowers and I think Maurice’s superpower is that he can really ask the right questions to tease out the correct information from anyone. If you’re in a position where you do need to be going down this path of writing tenders, I think Maurice is the best guy to be speaking to.

As a printing company, Prominent Press were looking to develop new areas of business when we decided to explore government tenders. We bid for a few projects but when we weren’t successful, we realised we needed help to understand where we were going wrong and how we could do better. That’s when we got in touch with Corfocus. We engaged Maurice from Corfocus to build our tendering system from the ground up. First, he visited our business to do a review of past tenders and what needed to be done. He then set about building all the resources we needed to develop tenders that would help win us future business. Over the next 10 weeks or so Maurice sent drafts of the material through so we could check they reflected how we did business. He then worked with us on our first tender to make sure we understood how to use the system, which was particularly helpful. We now have everything we need to confidently tender for new business in the future. The other important benefit is we have learnt a lot by working with Maurice. I understand those complex tender documents much better now and recognise the kind of information we need to include. Corfocus were very knowledgeable and easy to work with and Maurice’s inside knowledge of how evaluation panel’s think really makes a world of difference.

When the new RFT for Employment Services was released we knew it was important for us, in fact our whole business future depended on it. We also wanted to bid for new areas to hopefully grow our business. We looked at various tender writing services but chose Maurice from Corfocus because he understood our core business and how to write a tender which would meet the govt needs. At our first meeting it was pretty obvious Maurice knew his stuff, particularly around how tenders are evaluated and what we needed to do to give us the best chance of success. Maurice wrote the drafts and sent them through to us for review. Throughout a very hectic response period we found that Maurice was committed to our cause, easy to work with and flexible – a real professional. When the results of the tender were announced last week we were ecstatic - we won everything we bid for! Our business will now grow from 6 to 19 branch offices and our revenue will double. Nobody can guarantee success but if you are serious about giving yourself the best chance of winning your tenders then get Corfocus on board.

My business partner and I had the pleasure of working with Maurice and his team on two government tenders. We are ecstatic that we won the first one and are awaiting the results of the second. It was the first time we had invested in external consultants to support us through this process and we are pleased with our decision to use Maurice and Corfocus. Maurice has the ability to cut through answers and get to the core of addressing questions in a strategic and succinct way. We found Maurice had the expertise and experience to add value to our tender and his understanding of the compliance elements allowed for time saving and smoother processes. We found Maurice to be professional in all dealings and have no hesitation in using Corfocus again or in recommending them for potential new clients.

Tendering has been a struggle for us and results have been poor, we required help with understanding the RFT and addressing the responses. Corfocus has been on both sides of the fence and this shows through their understanding of the procurement process and their knowledge of what the evaluation panel is looking for.

Corfocus Consulting was a key part of our recent Australian Apprenticeship Support Network tender win. Without Maurice Downing’s expert advice and guidance, our tender response would not have been of the high quality required to win such a major contract.

Once we engaged Corfocus, Maurice also took us through an extensive investigation of our own resources and capabilities to match tender requirements, after which he helped us build a “tender machine” that enabled us to respond more quickly and with greater conformity than ever before. We went from winning about 12% of our tenders to winning 40%. This percentage was actually lower than Corfocus and ourselves had planned on, however the types of tenders we were now winning were multi-year, multi high dollar tenders where before we were only winning lower valued, one-off tenders. The cost-benefit of this type of win is enormous. Maurice has an uncanny ability to read between the lines of a tender request and to extract exactly what the tenderer is looking for. This helps to either answer the tender properly, or to determine whether it’s something we actually want to take on. We have saved considerable time and money not going for tenders we would otherwise have attempted, and lost. We would recommend Maurice and Corfocus to anyone who is serious about entering the tender world because to give yourself a real fighting chance, you need to have someone who knows the process back to front and Corfocus is more than capable in this regard.

Corfocus has the ability to get inside a business and understand how it works, this combined with the ability to generate extra meaning in the tender requirements and the skill to craft a comprehensive response that reduces point’s leakage with a singularity of purpose, winning the tender made them a good choice for us. They were referred to us and we have since referred them to others.

The RFT document was a mystery to us. Corfocus was responsive and knowledgeable in the analysis of the selection criteria. They provided guidance in understanding the language, interpreting the intention of the selection criteria and helped us structure the tender with an appreciation of what the evaluation panel is looking for. Corfocus was passionate about stopping point leakage and ultimately about winning the tender for us. “They are the best Legal inside knowledge you can get for government tenders!