Getting qualified

Federal departments do not buy professional services one contract at a time. They pre-qualify a pool of suppliers and then buy from that pool. If you are not in the pool when the work appears, you do not lose the bid - you never see it, because it never becomes a public tender.

Getting into the pool is a paperwork exercise, and where it fails the reason is almost never capability. On the informatics vehicles, the response did not answer the question the way the evaluation grid reads it. On ProServices, a reference did not answer PSPC’s one email.

What we do

We run the qualification end to end, as a fixed-scope project:

• Work out which vehicle actually gates your revenue. Firms routinely qualify onto the wrong one, or onto three when one would have done. This is decided from your own contract history and the categories you already sell in, not from a brochure.
• Assemble the response. On TBIPS, SBIPS and TSPS: corporate documents, financial capacity, the reference projects, the security requirements, the certifications. Most of the effort is in reference projects: they have to demonstrate the specific categories claimed, in the words the grid uses. On ProServices the entry itself takes an afternoon once the references are known; the work is choosing them.
• Manage what comes after submission. On the informatics vehicles that is the deficiency cycle: almost every first submission comes back with findings, each on a short clock, and it is where most in-house attempts stall because the response reads as a rejection. On ProServices there is no deficiency cycle. A category passes or fails on whether an outside client that paid your invoice answers PSPC’s single email, so the work is choosing references that meet the tests, briefing them, and chasing on the day the email lands.
• Hand over a package you can re-use. The next refresh, the next stream, the next category. The material is yours and it is organised to be picked up again.

Where it ends

Qualification gets you into the room. The bids inside it are yours to write, and winning them is your team’s work: the firm that writes its own proposals is the firm that keeps learning what its buyers want.

The evaluation is PSPC’s to make. What we control is the quality of the submission: the right vehicle, the reference projects written to the grid or the references chosen to answer, and the evaluation followed to the end.

How it starts

With the record. We can show you, from the public procurement record, what your firm has won federally, in which categories, and whether anything in that record suggests you are already on the vehicle that gates it.

That report costs nothing and it is checkable line by line, because it is built from the same open data the departments publish.