Client story: Amey Secure Infrastructure

Business success is down to serendipity more often than anyone might care to admit. And at BidCraft we’ve had many a chance meeting evolve into something more.

We met leadership staff from Amey Secure Infrastructure (SI) through good old-fashioned networking. After crossing paths regularly at events and conferences over the years, we started to work together in February 2019, when an ideal opportunity presented itself.

We were brought in to develop a capture strategy to help Amey SI compete for the Ministry of Defence’s Future Maritime Support Programme (FMSP) tender. The opportunity was worth £732m over seven years and Amey SI recognised the value we’d bring to the process. Our Managing Director Jon Darby was engaged as Capture Lead, heading up a team of around 15 people.

For Jon and the team, this meant developing the capture strategy and preparing for the tender release, reporting to Amey SI’s Defence Steering Group throughout. We undertook months of research and planning, including customer stakeholder analysis, investigating supply chain viability, and competitor analysis. Following a pre-mortem, we led multiple win strategy and solution-shaping workshops to prepare the team. Our structured workshops ensured Amey SI’s staff helped shape the solutions within the capture strategy.

When the invitation to tender was eventually released, the Defence Steering Group was guided by our joint capture planning to determine whether it was worth pursuing a bid. In this case – thanks to our input – they decided against bidding.

Now, this may seem counterintuitive. A bidding services company recommending a client DOESN’T put forward a bid. But we’re all about integrity. Our clients trust us because of it. Based on our thorough capture analysis, Amey SI had doubts about the contract going anywhere but back to the incumbent – and so it proved. Without our capture strategy work, they could have ploughed effort, resources and money into a bid that was unlikely to bear fruit. And so it proved that by investing in capture strategy, they avoided diluting their overall bidding efforts.