The short version: one tender response costs about a week of real working time, split between two days building the technical answer and two days proving you are allowed to give it. Add a day for every in-person briefing. One bid coordinator can hold about three live tenders before the system buckles, and a disciplined company wins roughly half of what it enters. A week of senior time, capped at three attempts, for a coin flip. Every competent company that avoids tenders has done that arithmetic, and they are right.
Most companies that avoid tenders do not say why out loud. They say they are busy, or that the pricing never works, or that the process is rigged. Underneath all three answers sits an arithmetic problem that nobody has written down. Here it is.
How long does one tender response actually take?
About a week of real working time, split roughly in half. Two days to produce the technical response, and two days to assemble the compliance pack.
The technical half is the part people expect. A colleague of mine runs a strategy consultancy called Numbers Over Fame. When he responded to a CCMA opportunity he spent two full days on it, reading the organisation, working out what they were actually trying to solve, then writing a programme specific to them. Two days of a senior person’s time, on one section of one bid.
The compliance half is the part people forget, and for a smaller company it is often the bigger half. Tax pins, certified copies, CSD registration, reference letters, CVs, proof of address, BBBEE certificates. Anything with an expiry date has to be regenerated, and anything requiring a third party has to be requested and waited for.
So: two days building the answer, two days proving you are allowed to give it. A week gone, for one submission, with no guarantee attached to any of it.
Why do good companies skip tenders they could win?
Two reasons, and only one of them is about effort.
The first is scoring. The founder of a Johannesburg digital adoption firm told me why she does not bid. Her company is women owned and white owned, which scores on some lines and not on the one that usually carries the most weight. She has written off public tenders entirely and sells through proposals to corporates instead. That is a rational decision by a capable business, and the tender process is poorer for it.
The second is heartbreak, and she used that word. Her description was that you pour your heart and soul into a submission and then hear nothing, and after enough of those you stop. That is a business refusing, correctly, to keep spending a week at a time on an outcome it cannot influence.
Does it get cheaper the more you bid?
Half of it does. The compliance half falls away fast, and the technical half barely moves.
Compliance has real economies of scale. The two days you spend assembling documents for the first tender covers you for the next three, because certificates, registrations and reference letters are reusable until they expire. Frequent bidders keep that folder alive as a matter of routine and fetch from it. Rare bidders regenerate everything each time, which is exactly why the occasional bidder pays the highest price per bid.
The technical half does not behave that way. You can build a library, but if the library is handmade then someone still has to customise it to the bid in front of them. The honest ceiling is that two days becomes something closer to one. If your team can produce a genuine technical response in a day, you are running well.
What does a tender briefing cost you?
A day, if it is in person, and the day is mostly travel.
Count it properly. Getting into the car, thirty minutes to an hour of driving at best, finding parking, arriving early. An hour for the briefing itself. Then the return trip. That is most of a working day for one hour of information, and the further the briefing sits from your office the worse the arithmetic gets, until at some distance you have to pay someone local to attend on your behalf and the time cost becomes a money cost.
I once drove to the far side of Rustenburg with a colleague, both of us late, both of us driving in a way I would not recommend, to reach a compulsory briefing we had already qualified to attend. We made it, barely, after a fight to get into the building. The tender went to someone local with a deeper relationship. The entire day, and the risk we took getting there, bought nothing.
Online briefings cost forty five minutes and a calendar slot. When you have the choice, that difference is the whole argument.
How many tenders can one coordinator run at once?
Three, and three is already a strain.
That is the number from running this for years. A single bid coordinator can actively manage about three live tenders before the system buckles, and the buckling does not happen to them first. It happens to everyone they depend on. Three bids means three technical teams being chased, three sets of compliance being pulled, three sets of CVs and reference letters and pricing requests, all against three different dates.
That ceiling is the real constraint on how much work a company can win, and almost nobody thinks of it that way. Your pipeline is not limited by how many tenders exist that you could win. It is limited by how many one person can hold at a time.
What is a realistic win rate?
Around half, if you are disciplined about what you enter. Higher than that when you were in the room before the specification was written.
We ran at roughly fifty percent on tenders we chose to pursue, and that number is high because of what we refused to enter rather than how well we wrote. The rule was simple: if we could not score full marks on compliance, we did not bid. If we could not score full marks on methodology, we did not bid.
That discipline makes sense once you see how the scorecards are weighted. Compliance is typically thirty to forty five percent of the total. Price is typically fifteen to twenty percent. The band in the middle is methodology, project management and the strength of the CVs. The cheapest points on the card are the ones that cost you organisation rather than margin, and most companies spend their energy on the line worth the least.
We performed best on tenders where we had done unpaid diagnostic work for the department months earlier. Somebody had a problem, called us in, and we helped them understand what was actually wrong before anyone wrote a specification. That work is unbilled and thankless, and it produced our highest hit rate by a wide margin.
So what is the actual arithmetic?
A week of effort, a ceiling of three at a time, and a coin flip at the end of it if you are good.
Put those three numbers together and the behaviour of every competent company that avoids tenders becomes obvious. They have calculated, correctly, that a week of senior time for a fifty percent chance, capped at three attempts running, is a worse use of the week than almost anything else they could do with it.
Which means the problem is not appetite. The problem is the cost per attempt, and that is a fixable number.
We built Landani to fix it. The next piece walks through the same week with Landani in it, and shows which parts still need a human.
Questions people ask about the cost of bidding
How much does it cost to respond to a tender?
Roughly a week. For a small consultancy that is the most expensive week it will spend all month. Two days on the technical response, two days assembling compliance, and a day for every compulsory briefing you have to attend in person.
Is it worth bidding for government tenders as a small business?
It depends on two numbers: how many you can run at once, and how many you win. If one person can hold three live bids and you win half of them, the maths works only when contract values are high enough to justify a week per attempt. Lower the cost per attempt and the answer changes.
How many tenders should a company bid for?
As many as it can respond to properly, and the ceiling is the coordinator rather than the market. Most companies with one bid coordinator top out at three live tenders at a time, which is why capacity and not opportunity is usually the real limit on how much work they win.
What is a good tender win rate?
Around fifty percent is achievable if you are disciplined about what you enter. That number is high because of what you refuse to bid rather than how well you write: if you cannot score full marks on compliance and full marks on methodology, the bid is usually not worth the week.
Why do BBBEE requirements stop some companies bidding?
Because the scoring weight on ownership can be decisive regardless of capability, so companies that score well on some elements and poorly on ownership write off public tenders entirely and sell through proposals to the private sector instead. That is a rational commercial decision, and it is one reason capable suppliers stay out of the public market.
Are online tender briefings better than in-person ones?
For the bidder, considerably. An online briefing costs forty five minutes and a calendar slot. An in-person briefing costs most of a working day once travel is counted, and more if it is far enough away that you have to pay somebody local to attend for you.