MD Steve O'Hare explains why he is looking forward to more diversification after a lengthy spell on RoATP.
SCLO’s remit has stretched far and wide over the years from designing training for Dutch coffee conglomerate Douwe Egberts to supporting label makers for the gin and whisky industry tender for grants.
Mmmm, coffee and alcohol…sounds like a good weekend to me!
Diversifying into other projects that veer away from SCLO’s traditional ‘bread and butter’ of the education sector is something I love doing and has helped me develop numerous skills.
Those projects have taught me that tendering for activity and bidding for work are transferable skills that can work across many sectors.
RoATP
A bid is a bid…or so they say.
I have enjoyed an incredibly busy spell since the lifting of pandemic restrictions with work around the Register of Apprenticeship Training Providers (RoATP) consuming a significant amount of my time..
With this coming to an end now, it will allow me to put some more of my time into those sort of diversification sectors I enjoyed working with before the pandemic struck.
One of my favourite projects was supporting awarding bodies to bid for Government licenses like the T Levels. Whereas previous work I had done had focuses on delivery of contracts, this was about delivery of a development process. We had a lot of success with the company I worked for too.
The opportunity to work with Douwe Egberts saw me write a package which helped the company’s pre-bidding engagement team, support the people who were going to bid for work.
Government
If that team wanted to put their coffee machines into a place of work, it helped them develop different approaches towards whether they were bidding to a limited company, plc or local Government. My role was to help them decipher the differences between each possibility and how to approach that.
Something I am also keen to do more of is critiquing failed bids and providing feedback, so companies don’t make the same mistakes the next time around.
I think as people and as businesses, most of us are probably guilty of neglecting that time to look back on what we have done and try to work out how we could have done it better.
So, if you represent a company that needs some support for a bid, please remember that SCLO Consulting has experience in a myriad of sectors. Please get in touch via the 'contact' section of our website.
Read more: Top five tips for successful bid writing
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