The Red Review - Re-competes are all that
Rebidding is where its at with Nigel Thacker
In this episode, Jeremy is joined by Rebidding and Recapture expert Nigel Thacker to talk all things winning deals again and landing and expanding.
Find Nigel Thacker on LinkedIn - Nigel Thacker
Transcript
[00:00.4]
I'm Jeremy Brim and welcome to the Red Review Podcast brought to you today by, Growth Ignition, the transformation consulting and enabling tech business. All in the work winning space and the Bid Toolkit, our, online bid process and guide. So, hello and welcome to the Red Review with me, Jeremy Brim.
[00:21.4]
We're getting back to some proper bidding geeky stuff at the moment. You might have seen on my LinkedIn, we've been doing a lot more about subjects like storyboarding on bidding in our top tips, answer planning, all of that kind of stuff. We've done some stuff on CVs, etcetera, because we do find there's more engagement actually at that sort of where the end, where push comes to shove, where the real action happens.
[00:46.7]
And so coming back to basics a bit, although not quite basics. This week, we're going to be talking about, rebidding with my friend Nigel Thacker. Hello, Nigel. Welcome to the podcast. Hello. Hello. Good to have you along, sir. So, Nigel, you've become a bit of a Grandmaster Jedi at the school of thought of, re bidding.
[01:08.1]
I've been following you for some years, for lots of reasons, but particularly this one. This is actually the first of two episodes that Nigel and I are going to do together. We're going to do another one on leadership, another proposition he spun up in the last couple of years, but I guess the one you're known for best, Nigel is rebuilding.
[01:24.0]
But first of all, if you wouldn't mind, just give me a bit of, background, in terms of your career and what you get up to these days, and then we'll get into the subject, if that's okay. Yeah, sure. So I got into bidding 1995, which is starting to reveal how old I actually am.
[01:46.9]
When I joined a company called Serco, I'd previously been in marketing, and I was, I was a lecturer for the CIM course. And then Serco got hold of me and, wanted me to come in and do some training for them on bidding.
[02:05.5]
Never run a bid in my life, but they wanted me to do training on bidding. So I took on their training manager role worldwide. That got me into bidding. And since then I've been doing bidding, bid director, work, winning lead, all that sort of thing for years and years.
[02:27.0]
Then ended up writing a couple of books on rebidding because I was looking for a book on rebidding to teach me all the stuff I didn't know about it. There wasn't One, And since then I've been sort of jumping between being a biz dev director versus sometime doing consultancy.
[02:48.5]
For the last year it's been back to doing consultancy and probably will be now. So yes, at the moment I'm doing the rebid consultancy and the leadership stuff which is much more recent. But the rebidding stuff is I mean the principles of that have been going for a long while.
[03:07.6]
I mean I first learned the principles of rebidding 15, 20 years ago. And they still, they're still the same as they were. Yeah. Okay, so let's just position the subject matter then and, and its importance because us bidding pros and people that have been around our professional body and some of the bigger firms, etc, kind of we take for granted that the more mature organisations vaguely know what they're doing, when it comes to their funnels and bidding for deals, which of course they don't actually, you know, we're tending.
[03:47.1]
I do a lot of work with Department for Business and Trade as well as with my client base. And we tend to find actually most businesses that are a thousand people or less are truly terrible in terms of their levels of maturity, and are bidding for most things, very low win rates, quite unhappy staff, frazzled bid teams, etc.
[04:09.3]
Etc. It's actually, you know, it's only the odd little nugget, the odd wonderful business that's the David, you know, to the Goliath punching above their weight. The bigger firms do tend to be more mature and understand what capture is and maybe have a key account management programme but it's still actually a fairly small proportion of businesses.
[04:29.4]
When we've talked before, Nigel, haven't we offline that this is so critical to the long term sustainability and predictability of a business and its growth? I've just got out of a meeting with the board of a large consulting firm where talking through how they've been successful over the years, it's largely all been about repeat business, direct awards of work from current clients.
[04:55.4]
So you know, in a lot of the work I've been doing recently and the campaign I'm doing on LinkedIn about how to double your margin, the, the two big building blocks that are often missing from B2B B2G businesses that have to bid for work are key account management and then capture.
[05:13.2]
But the rebidding element within capture is absolutely critical. And so I'm excited about unpacking how to approach this with you because again as you probably do, I get approached by clients all the time, you know. Jezza, will you come and help us with this captcha pursuit?
[05:30.2]
Because they've seen something on my LinkedIn or one of my competitors or something and my heart always sinks a bit because I can tell by the tone of their voice they don't really know what captcha means. So I'll ask them, well, when's the bid out? And they'll say, oh, the SQ's out already, the bids out in two or three months time.
[05:48.2]
Well that's not capture then, because capture is a year plus, ideally, 18 months. And then my second question, which always reminds me of you, you always spring to mind is, is it for a recompete, or landing and expanding with a current client or is it a new piece of business with a new client?
[06:04.8]
And it's always a new piece of business with a new client. Guys, you know, you've got to. If, if we're finding around 80% of the margin for most B2B B2G businesses comes from 20% of their clients and it's on average and it's the clients that engage them early that are good to work with, that their people enjoy working with, etc.
[06:25.5]
Etc. Whereas the clients in the tail are the cold bids that they won last minute on price rather than quality, etc. Etc. So rebidding, I tend to say you should spend. If 80% of your margin is coming from 20% of your clients, you should spend 80% of your capture efforts around about maybe 60, certainly a good proportion of your capture efforts on recompetes, those, those recompeting a contract that's coming around or the next deal with a current client.
[06:55.9]
And so I've been excited to have this chat for some time, Nigel, because I've been saying that until I'm blue in the face and, and then, so that next level of detail now and how we approach a recompete is, is vital really. And so I'm sure I can introduce you to clients all over the place once we get this out of the way.
[07:13.9]
So how did your. So just remind us again, the recompete piece and your books that you've written, etc, what was the kind of genesis moment? How did that come about? What was the burning platform that inspired you to think about it first? I think it was, it was because there really wasn't anything out there.
[07:35.2]
I mean I got my experience of sort of the processes and what had happened and what we'd done and the best practise we built up in the businesses I'd been in. I, joined a new business and I was effectively trying to write out what their rebid process should be.
[07:52.2]
And I thought, well, hang on a sec, there's got to be something out there because it can't just be what I've done. And there really wasn't anything there. And I mean this particular company just wasn't preparing for its rebids.
[08:08.3]
It was assuming that they were going to win And they had decent processes for new bids, but they just weren't following them for the rebates. And the more I looked, the more I saw that that seemed to be the way things were happening elsewhere as well.
[08:29.9]
And it was just this sort of, complacency, I guess, in terms of people just were assuming they were going to win and rebids weren't seen as winning. A rebid wasn't seen as something to celebrate.
[08:47.8]
It was either, well, of course you were going to win or just relief that you'd won. And there was no real process about it. So it was something that I thought, well, if no one else has got something out there, I'll just pull together all the bits that are there and put them in a process.
[09:10.7]
The more I pushed that out, the more people were going, aha, yes. It wasn't anything, it wasn't anything new, it wasn't anything particularly innovative. It was just one of those things that was.
[09:25.7]
Just felt like a blind spot for people. And just pulling all that stuff together and giving it a focus and making it into something that was a coherent process just seemed to give people a little bit of a.
[09:44.3]
Oh, yeah, of course, that's obvious. Why didn't we think of that? Yeah, I mean there is some stuff. Having been an APMP trainer, no longer, opted out of that world, but having studied obviously the body of knowledge and its iterations over some years, having been a member, there is some alright stuff on being an incumbent and, or unseating an incumbent in the APMP's body of knowledge.
[10:14.7]
But like all APMP stuff, a bit like their capture stuff. Actually it's more a wish list because it's largely driven by bid writers. And so it's kind of a wish list from bid writers of what they wished had happened before a bid came out, not actually what capture should be, which is actually about trying to negotiate, deals, direct award deals.
[10:37.2]
You know, the last thing we actually ever want to do is write a competitive bid. Whereas obviously many of Our competitors kind of want that to happen so they can, you know, sell you some bid consultants. So I think first point of principle is the capture efforts towards a recompete have got to be about trying to direct the traffic towards co solution with clients procurement shape towards a negotiation or a contract extension, not a competitive tender.
[11:04.0]
The prep, the bid prep for a competitive tender is plan B. Plan A has got to be a negotiation. Right, so talk me through. So Nigel, you built out your processes, wrote a couple of books, so talk us without giving all of your IP away because we want people to come running to you in droves to get you to help them with this stuff.
[11:21.5]
But what are the key tent poles in your approach to recompeting? I sort of break it down into three areas, although there is a fourth that's sort of emerging a bit more now. One is how do you actually run the contract? And you're right as a bidder, a lot of bidders, it's a wish list of how you run the contract.
[11:43.4]
But actually I think a bit like you've been sort of talking about in terms of that whole positioning capture can, before you get to the bid side, it's something that if you are a bidder you need to get out there a little bit and you need to get that influence or at least knowledge of what's going on.
[12:03.1]
So part of it is how you actually run the contract because if you've been rubbish of running the contract, your chances of actually having a, I call it a recapture process, but it's largely same as the capture process. The chance of you having the relationships, the trust, the opportunity to actually influence the customer is a lot harder if you've been running a rubbish contract than if the customer is actually really happy with you and wants to talk to you.
[12:31.7]
So run the contract well and there's a whole load of stuff in there, the recapture process and thinking about that from an incumbent perspective and then there's the actual bid bit, the rebid bit, and how you deal with that as an incumbent, I mean it's a bid, it's a bid for everybody else.
[12:56.4]
But how you as the incumbent actually deal with that as sort of someone who should know what's going on, should have been able to influence the customer is slightly different. So I break it down to those three chunks and depending on where I am with a customer or a client, depends on which bit I focus on.
[13:20.3]
So I mean if we talk about the contract bit first, it's Things like how do you run a good contract? How do you actually put the things in place that are going to help you when you actually get to the rebid?
[13:37.4]
How do you work, and balance that culture between your short term need, to make your quarterly numbers versus your long term? Actually we want to have this for another five years, another seven years or whatever and how do you balance that culture?
[13:55.8]
But how do you put the things in place that are going to help you when you get to the rebid? Like, I've done a lot of rebates where nobody knows what happened on the contract because the data was never collected. The people that were there have left, the bid team were never involved.
[14:14.3]
So you just lose so much stuff. So a lot of it is around good contract management. But it's also about, have you captured the data? Have you got the measures that aren't just the KPIs that the customer put in place for compliance?
[14:32.0]
Have you actually got the evidence of what you've done, that sort of stuff on the contract? Then when you get to the recapture side, are you starting enough? Are you taking it seriously? Because a lot of people don't take it seriously for a rebate because you either assume you're going to win, you assume you know the customer, or you don't even know when the rebid comes out because it's not part of your business plan.
[14:56.1]
And that's a basic, that I have to do with some customers in terms of saying, well, when are your rebids due? What's your rebid pipeline? A lot of people got a pipeline of new business. But your rebid pipeline, you should, if you've got an average contract length of four years, you should know almost to the date when you need to start your recaptcha, for the next four years.
[15:19.9]
But so many people just don't know that. So then with the recaptcha stuff, it's really about who's actually responsible for this. Are you going to make someone responsible? Are you going to have a recapture manager? A lot of people go, why?
[15:35.0]
We've got the ops lead there or we've got the big guy there or the big lady there. So just getting people to put someone actually in charge of doing it, recognising you need to start early enough before the customer is starting to make some decisions. Exactly as you say, how do you get away from actually doing a rebid in the first place?
[15:57.5]
Can you get an extension? Can you maximise the extensions? Can you Get a direct award. Can you put it on a framework where no one else is or where other people aren't as good? All the things you do in capture. Yeah, yeah. But at the same time, it's then getting that balance between recognising what the customer is going to need for the next contract and saying, can we do some of that on this contract now?
[16:23.2]
Because we've actually got the luxury of running this contract now. So if we know the customer wants X new technology in the new contract rather than go in the rebid, yeah, we can do that for you, which is what everyone else is going to be doing.
[16:40.1]
Can you do things like say, well, let's put it in a year early so we can prove that it works. We've got the evidence, the customer knows we can do it, all that sort of stuff in preparation, that you've got that luxury of running the contract now that allows you to do things early.
[16:57.8]
So those sort of things in the, recapture phase don't do the rebid if you can avoid it. If you've got to do it, what prep do you do now? And then when you actually get to the rebid, you should already have a solution for the future in place.
[17:18.0]
You've hopefully, overcome the inertia of your existing solution because that can be a big problem for rebids, especially if the contract's working well. Everybody goes, well, we'll just do more of that with some variations on it. Whereas actually, you should be thinking, let's take a greenfield approach and come up with something completely new.
[17:38.5]
A lot of people go, well, no, no, hang on. Our biggest benefit is, we're the low risk solution. We shouldn't be changing things. Actually. Yeah, you should, because it's the next three, five years that the customer's worried about, not the last three, five years the customer's worried about.
[17:55.5]
So it's those three sections and for me, with different clients, it depends where I start. You know, if they've, if they've got hold of me and said, can you review our rebid submission? Well, the first two are irrelevant, but once we finish that, it's like, well, hang on, what about your next rebid?
[18:15.0]
When is it? What can we do beforehand? That sort of stuff. So, yeah, so rebidding, it does for me fit into those three phases. It's how do you run the contract, how do you do the recapture, how do you then vary what you're doing on a normal bid for your rebid?
[18:36.1]
Yeah, no, I completely agree. I think There's a few things in that, mate, that are going to come around. So one is the new for UK public sector or regulated industry, the New Procurement act that came into force in February, does have some new stuff in it, but bearing in mind it was born during the generation of Boris and Cummings, there is actually some sense in amongst all of the madness of that, there is actually some sensible stuff in there.
[19:02.6]
So I did a podcast episode with Rebecca Reese, the procurement lawyer from Travers and Hamlin, a couple of weeks ago, and she made a really good point around contract management now and transparency of delivery KPIs. So contracting authorities in their new procurements moving forwards should bake in some real KPIs for delivery, which should be measured against.
[19:26.3]
So from a recompete perspective, there's pros and cons to that. Because you're going to be measured on some things, it would be good if they were measures that you would like and that you're good at. But equally, that data will be publicly available to your competitors.
[19:44.7]
So they will be able to see, not just on this contract that you're looking to recompete and they're looking to unseat you on, but across all of your contracts over time, they'll be able to actually see your performance against probably some rudimentary measures and probably KPIs that aren't that bright, but they'll be able to see some stuff and things about some of the stuff and things.
[20:04.5]
So that will be useful to both us, but also our competitors. So we'll need to think about that from a capture and recompete perspective. But you're right, it depends where people are on the journey. I mean, the utopia would be that as part of business planning, they understand what recompetes they have in the next three to five years.
[20:26.3]
And actually, as part of their continuous improvement processes, as part of their ISO9001 quality management system, they should have a recompete process as a subroutine within continuous improvement. Yeah. So within their first hundred days of mobilisation of a new contract, there is a workshop for how we're going to delight the client and win it again in three years time or five years time, whatever it is, and someone's accountable for that plan.
[20:53.8]
And they do things like, I'm sure you get into, like annual reviews with clients or 6 monthly reviews where you walk the client what's gone well and not so well, lessons we've learned, what we're going to do about it, but also what we would like to change now and can change under the current contract, but also what we would advise you change for the recompete next time around.
[21:15.4]
That obviously suits you and perhaps undermines your competition as long as, I mean obviously we've got to be careful not to be too mercenary, haven't we mate? In that you could convince clients to do stuff that just suits you and doesn't necessarily deliver value for them. That's a bit dark.
[21:31.6]
So really I think the theme that runs through this for me is about how do we create the most value for the client and their communities or stakeholders and then we're just asking for a share of that value in return. And if on that journey it means that some of our competitors can't possibly compete and it would be ridiculous for them to give the job to anyone else, then happy days.
[21:53.7]
But that's got to be the focus, right? I mean, I agree. I mean pick a couple of things on that. One is I think the KPI stuff will be interesting. But I think you're right, it will be pretty basic stuff.
[22:10.1]
It will be compliancy stuff, shall we say. One of the things I've always done is try and find the things that aren't compliancy. It's the things that are the outcomes of what you do.
[22:27.9]
So the last sector I was working in as a, as a BD director, it was about helping older people stay at home for longer rather than going to care homes and do things like that.
[22:43.9]
And it was a logistics business at its base. But actually that was the outcome you were doing. You were keeping people at home rather than having to go care homes or hospitals. There were no KPIs around that in the contract. But actually if you start measuring those outcome things, you're getting a set of KPIs that are actually about the core purpose of that contract.
[23:09.6]
It's not how quickly you arrive when there's an order, it's not how quickly you do this or the logistics bit. It's actually about how are people feeling dignified in terms of being able to live at home, how are they feeling safe?
[23:28.1]
How are they feeling that they're actually not isolated, that sort of stuff. They're the sort of measures you don't get in a contract, but they're the sort of measures. If you put them in, you start to use them. A, you start making improvements to those sort of things that make a real difference to your end users.
[23:47.4]
And B, when you get to the rebid, you've got a whole bunch of evidence that shows you've done the right thing rather than just the thing right, if you like. So that's one, that's one side of it in terms of the KPIs, I think in terms of the lifecycle.
[24:05.5]
Yeah. I mean I sort of set out an ideal lifecycle for a contract from my perspective. And that starts right at the start with the promises register, actually doing what you said you were going to do in the bid, doing something at the end of the implementation that says have we actually implemented this properly?
[24:24.3]
And then the annual reports that come through, Midlife review, if you get the chance to do it, and then early on when you start. So if you're an organisation where you actually have got a process, if you can stick that process in, it's pretty much common across all the contracts, but it actually gets you through those processes that get you to the point that when you start doing the recapture process, you've got everything in place.
[24:54.9]
You're not going, oh my God, where do I find this? Oh my God, where's that? Oh my God, why can we start doing this that we haven't done for the last three years? And it just gives you that natural start, and becomes part of the culture of the business as well.
[25:11.7]
Yeah, absolutely. That's the key thing, isn't it? It's helped. My wife's doing a lot of work at the moment on client experience. So measuring net promoter scored feedback, survey and structured interview type stuff to understand how clients really feel about the service.
[25:28.9]
And it is interesting, the clients where they deploy proper key account management, they get better feedback and levels of insight than our clients that don't. So the closer you are to your top clients, the closer you work with them, the more you collaborate to create value for them, the deeper the level of insight they give you to enable your recompetes or capture recaptures later on.
[25:55.0]
So your business becomes a self fulfilling prophecy over time as long as you show that you're listening. One of the big problems I find in this space that I bet you find as well is it's not just that people take their clients for granted, which is stupid and therefore they just think they're just going to win that recompete and so they put much more effort because being growth orientated they're much more effort on the next new thing, shiny new thing.
[26:18.4]
It costs you seven times more to secure a piece of business with a new client than it does an existing client still just don't. This doesn't register, does it? Just land and expand with what you've got and then just add a client or two each year and you'll smash your numbers to bits. But the big bit I get, particularly with commercial people, is they want to propose and price what they wished the client was asking for rather than what they've actually asked for.
[26:45.2]
When you get. When push comes to shove, when the recompete comes out, the amount of times I've had to take commercial directors in the room one on one and say, look, you've got to price what's in the spec, however shoddy that spec is. Yeah. And you know they've gone, and I know you're upset, they've gone and punted out the same spec as they gave you five years ago.
[27:02.8]
When you've iterated it and you know you've taken them on a journey and done loads of good work, but you've got to price what's in front of you. Use clarifications etc to, you know, if you want to and debunk it. But fundamentally, if they've asked you to price apples, you've got to price apples, not oranges.
[27:18.8]
Yeah. And I think there's two sides to that as well. One is the costing side of it in terms of your solution, which comes back to that inertia of our solution's working great now, therefore, we'll just price that or we'll tweak a bit here or tweak a bit there.
[27:37.9]
And actually, no, you need a new solution for the new contract. So if you sort of, you cost base, but then I think you can, in some, some organisations, some markets, you actually end up, in a place where you've got almost a ratchet effect because you bid something at a certain margin and over the three or four years you're running that contract, you get better and better at it.
[28:02.7]
So you're making a bit more margin margin yet to the end of the contract you're actually making quite a good margin and you know, your FD sort of goes, well, that's the margin we'll be rebidding it at then. No, can't do that. We're going to have to get competitive with it and then it ratchets up again over the next five years.
[28:22.8]
So getting that cost inside of the new solution, that learns from. But isn't, it's not acting as an anchor on what you should be doing. And then having a proper price margin conversation, that's not just.
[28:41.7]
Well, that's the margin we were making last year. Therefore it's got to be the margin for the new contract. That's a pricing conversation that can be difficult. Yeah, it is in terms of that base input price, but also. And that price or price to win or that plan for profit over time over a contract.
[29:03.9]
But there's, there's more to it, isn't there, in terms of value? Because there may well be points or you might influence the client to give you points for added value. But again we, we may well internally think that certain things are valuable or we're really excited about our carbon initiative or carbon reduction initiative or whatever it is.
[29:25.8]
But as I have to explain to people, it doesn't matter if the client doesn't care. You can only position value with them that they value. So we, we must, because we will be very excited about what a wonderful job we've done of delivering this contract. But there could be of the five things that we think are really valuable and we're excited about, they might only care about two or three.
[29:47.2]
There's no point writing about all five or positioning all five with them because they won't care about it. Do you think, is it, do you have a pre mortem in your processes for this? Do you do the old, you know, ask ourselves a year and a half before the tender comes out, how would we lose this bid and what are we going to do about it?
[30:05.6]
Yeah, and that what I try and do is actually get a proper kickoff for the, for the recapture process because it can be really difficult to actually do that with a repid because everybody's busy running the contract.
[30:24.4]
There is that natural. Well, we're going to win it or we're used to it, whatever, so we don't really need to start this year. Everybody's focused on the bright new contracts that you're going to win rather than focusing on these. So it's the way I tend to start this off is have a proper kickoff meeting for the recapture process, bring in the bidders, bringing anyone else, bring in the ops people, and sort of ask a bunch of questions about what's happened on the contract, what's happening on the contract, who's the customer, what's happening next, what do they want?
[31:02.0]
And the answers to those things start to drive the whole recapture process. Or more often the fact that people don't know the answers to those things is what gets people a little bit, about the fact that they thought this was going to be easy and actually realise it's not.
[31:24.5]
And that can then get you to the stage where you can go, well, this isn't a definite win. You know, there's lots of gaps here. How, could we lose this contract? And it just gets people a little bit more, a little bit more focused.
[31:42.3]
Yeah, there's the whole. No, you don't. You're right, you bang on. And there's. There's the whole zippering and succession bit with the client side that people often miss as well, that. I had a client a couple of years ago. They came to me in the December and it was the classic, oh, can you help us with the capture of this re?
[32:01.2]
It was a recompete, in fairness. I said, oh, when's the tender on? They said, oh, the SQ's out already. The tender's out in February. Oh, what are you doing? And they've held this contract for 20 years. And an excellent delivery team working on. There'd been some bumps in the road and all that kind of stuff, but they just hadn't seen it coming.
[32:20.6]
That the key client people they'd worked with for a long time had retired or were about to retire as the bid came out. And they just didn't know the people that would, you know, ultimately be reading their bids. You know, on average, there's five people read every tender that's submitted. Who are those five people?
[32:37.8]
How well do we know them, what keeps them up at night, all of that kind of thing. They just didn't have it. So they've done some great work in positioning some ideas with the client in how to do better next time and all sorts of stuff. But also they did actually lose in the end, for lots of reasons.
[32:53.6]
But one of them was they just didn't know what kept those people up at night, what was on their scorecard for their appraisal, that they value, that we could help with all of that classic capture stuff. And so, you know, it's just so vital, isn't it? You keep pace because you can take those client relationships for granted and then they change and you're screwed.
[33:10.4]
You've got to have it all mapped, haven't you? Worked? Yeah. And. And sometimes it can work against you knowing the customer, because, you know, if you haven't got CAM in place, the customer, you know, is probably the operational customer. Yep.
[33:26.3]
Your operational team know their direct opposite number on the. On the customer side. And, you get used to it. And there's the assumption, you know, the customer you get feedback from that customer, but it's not the right person necessarily.
[33:41.5]
In fact, you know, most of the time it's not the right customer, but you get lulled into that false sense of security. We're really close to the customer. And getting your recapture team to actually say, well, who are the people that are actually going to decide this?
[33:59.7]
Who are the people that are going to be deciding whether it is rebid or not, deciding the type of rebid, deciding what goes into it, questions that are asked, the whole gamut of things you do in capture, it can be something that there's that, it's not arrogance, but it's not necessarily complacency, but it's just that sense of, well, we already know the customer so we don't need to get to know them again.
[34:28.0]
Which you don't necessarily have with a new bid because, you know, you don't know the customer before you start the whole process. So you've got to overcome some of those sort of, almost internal myths or legends about how well you know the customer.
[34:46.0]
And you've got almost undo that before you start the new process as well. So that's a big part, I think, of the whole difference between capture and recaptcha, is almost undoing what people think they know.
[35:01.9]
Yeah, yeah. A burden of knowledge, I call it. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And just working through that process. As I say, you've actually got a luxury of running the contract now, so you should have more access, you should have more opportunity to understand, you should have more, as I said before, opportunity to actually do the things, you know, the customer wants in the next contract, but start doing them in this contract.
[35:37.4]
And again, then you've got to sort of manage the investment versus the profit element during that last year, or longer in terms of saying how much are we actually going to invest in how we run this contract slightly differently, to get it to a stage where it's what the customer's going to want next time to a certain degree, rather than just maximise our, profit until the end of this contract and sort of hope or make promises to the customer that we know we've been running it this way, but yes, of course we'll run it that way next time you've got an opportunity with a rebid to say you want it run that way next time.
[36:22.6]
And here's how we've been moving towards that in the last 18 months or whatever. Yeah, absolutely. And there might be changes the client wants to make that are palatable, or some might be unpalatable, they might want a different team, they might need to change.
[36:37.7]
Some people, if you don't have the depth of relationships, if you don't go and ask them how they feel about things, then, you won't know what you don't know, what you don't know. So, you've got to work on that plan. Closeness of relationship over time, understand, you know, shape the solution with them.
[36:54.0]
But it might involve some change and so you've got to stay on Germany. Really interesting, really interesting. Well, I'm sure people can take a lot from that. Thank you very much. Nigel, how do people get hold of you? Find you on LinkedIn.
[37:09.7]
What's your business name? The business is RebiddingSolutions. So, Rebidding.co.uk loads of articles and things like that on the, on the, on the website. So even if people just want read the articles, there's a lot there.
[37:28.8]
Yeah. So, yeah, have a look on LinkedIn or go there, and you can get hold of me for a chat. Very good. Well, thank you, mate. As I say, we're going to do another episode together on your leadership development stuff because that's another, really important area for leaders of big functions and work, winning leaders.
[37:50.0]
So I look forward to talking about that one next time. Thank you very much. Thanks, mate. We'll see you next time.
