There is a particular kind of email that arrives in a small business inbox and gets closed again within about eight seconds.
It is the one with a tender attached. Forty pages. A question set that wants your quality management approach, your environmental policy, three case studies, your social value commitments and a method statement. Deadline in eleven days.
You may well be able to do the work. That is the maddening part. But the bid is two full days of writing you have not got, for something you might not win, and so it gets closed and the contract goes to a firm three times your size who has someone whose job this is.
For many small businesses a big barrier to public sector work is writing time. You can do the job and you can price it. You just cannot find two days to write the bid.
This guide is about shrinking that barrier. Claude can help draft answers from information you provide. It cannot win the work for you, and a good bid does not guarantee a contract. Treat the timings in this guide as rough.
What is actually out there
Start by finding a suitable contract.
UK public bodies advertise many of their contracts openly. Since February 2025, new opportunities of all sizes go on Find a Tender, generally from twelve thousand pounds upwards (including VAT) for central government and thirty thousand for councils and other public bodies. Not every purchase is advertised, and some buyers, schools for example, have exemptions. Scotland has Public Contracts Scotland, Wales has Sell2Wales, and Northern Ireland has its own service; the government's Contracts Finder page lists them. Contracts Finder still carries some older procurements. Councils, schools, NHS trusts, housing associations, universities and police forces all buy through these, and a great deal of what they buy is ordinary: cleaning, grounds maintenance, small building works, IT support, training, catering, repairs, translation, design.
Your first step: set up a search
Do this before anything else, because it tells you whether there is work worth writing for.
- Search for Find a Tender. It is free to search.
- Search for your trade in plain words, add your area, and show only live opportunities.
- Save the search and ask for an email alert, so new matches reach your inbox.
Done when you have a saved search and the confirmation email. The official search walkthrough shows the screens. Use your software's own options for the exact clicks, because they change.
To bid on Find a Tender opportunities you will usually need to register your organisation on the service. The official registration guide covers it. If you have no Companies House number, check that guide for what to do instead. Some buyers also run their own separate portal, which needs its own registration. Done when you can log in and your supplier details are filled in.
Smaller buys and supplier lists
Some buyers also buy smaller things through quotes or supplier lists rather than an open tender. The rules differ from buyer to buyer, so ask. Find the procurement contact on the buyer's website, ask whether they keep a list for your kind of work, and send your business details if they do. Done when you have their written confirmation. Joining a list does not guarantee you will be invited to quote.
The thing to understand about bid writing
Bids feel like writing, but mostly you are answering the same questions again, and the answers are more repetitive than they look.
Across almost any tender you will be asked, in slightly different words each time:
- How do you make sure the work is done to a good standard
- What happens when something goes wrong
- Who does the work and what are they qualified to do
- How do you handle health and safety
- How do you handle data and confidentiality
- What do you do about the environment
- What social value do you bring to the local area
- Tell us about somewhere you have done this before
You probably have answers to many of those, in your head rather than in a document, and you rebuild them from scratch every time, in a different word count, against a different set of scoring criteria. Where you have no answer yet, such as a written environmental policy, that is useful to know before a deadline.
Rebuilding the answers each time is what takes the time.
Before you start
You need a free Claude account. Claude is the AI assistant made by a company called Anthropic.
- On a laptop, go to claude.ai. On a phone, download the Claude app for iPhone or Android. Sign up with your email address.
- You will see a message box. Type or paste your request into it, then press the send button.
- Claude's reply appears underneath. When it does, that step is done.
Four things worth knowing before you paste anything in:
- Voice notes. To talk instead of type, tap the microphone on your phone's keyboard and speak. Your phone turns what you say into text, and you paste that text in.
- Leave out what you do not need. Skip bank details, and anything personal about a customer that the job does not need. If you would rather your chats were not used to train Anthropic's models, check the privacy settings in Claude.
- You check everything. What comes back is a draft. Read it against your own notes before it goes to anyone, and correct names, dates and prices. It does get things wrong.
- Limits. The free plan has usage limits. If you hit one, wait, or finish that one by hand.
Build an answer bank, once
Do this on a quiet afternoon rather than when a deadline is on you. It saves you repeating the same answers on every bid.
Open a new chat with Claude and tell it what you do. Replace the words in square brackets with your own, then send it:
I run a small [what you do] business in [where], with [how many] people. I want to start bidding for public sector contracts. I am going to build a bank of standard answers I can reuse.
Interview me. Ask me the questions a public sector buyer would ask, one at a time, and keep asking follow-ups until you have got a proper answer out of me rather than a vague one. Cover these eight topics, one at a time, and summarise each answer for my approval before moving on: how I make sure work is done to a good standard; what happens when something goes wrong; who does the work and what they are qualified to do; health and safety; data and confidentiality; the environment; social value to the local area; and examples of similar work I have done. Start with the first. Only use what I tell you. If I do not do something, I will say so, and you should note it as a gap.
Then type your answers as you would say them to a person. It will push you when you are being woolly, which is the useful part, because "we take quality very seriously" gives a marker little to score and a specific description of what you actually do gives them something to mark.
Claude will work through the eight topics one at a time. When you are happy with one, say:
That answer is approved. Move to the next topic.
Expect this to take an hour or so, and it is a bit tedious. Say plainly when you do not do something yet, for example if you have no written environmental policy or no apprentices. Claude should record that as a gap. Do not let it turn a gap into a claim. Then:
Turn everything I have told you into a reusable answer bank. One section per topic. Write it in plain English in my voice, not in corporate language. Use only what I have confirmed. Show confirmed facts, unanswered questions and anything I would have to start doing as three separate lists. For each topic, note what evidence a buyer might want to see alongside it, and mark any evidence I have not yet got. I will approve each section before you move on.
Gather the evidence that the bank names: insurance certificates, accreditations, job records, references. Keep them in one folder. Mark anything missing.
Done when every topic has an answer you have approved or a gap you have recorded, and you have the bank in a document. To keep it, select the text, copy it into a document on your computer or phone (Word, Google Docs, Notes or any text editor will do), give it a clear name such as "Answer bank" and save it somewhere you can find again. Reopen it once to check it saved.
Keep it and update it when your business changes.
Turning the bank into a bid
When a live opportunity comes up from your alert, work through these in order.
1. Get the whole pack. Follow the notice to the buyer's own portal, register your interest, and download everything: the instructions, the question set, any pricing sheet and the contract terms. Done when you have every document the notice lists, saved in one folder.
2. Check what you may share. Before you upload anything to Claude, read the tender documents for confidentiality conditions, and take out personal information you do not need. Turning off model improvement in your settings does not itself give you permission to share a buyer's documents.
3. Upload the pack and your bank. Attach the documents with the "+" button in the chat box. If a file will not upload, copy the questions in as text. Then ask Claude to list every document it received and anything it could not read, and check that list against what you downloaded. Done when nothing is missing.
4. Decide whether to bid. Start with this:
Here is a tender I am considering bidding for, and here is my answer bank.
Before I write anything, list every mandatory requirement in a table: the requirement, where in the documents it appears, what evidence in my answer bank supports it, and what is unresolved. Do not guess. If you cannot tell, say so. Also list the deadline, any site visits, the payment terms, the contract length, the volume and area, and any requirement to take on existing staff.
This is the most useful check in the guide. In our experience a good share of tenders have a hard requirement you cannot meet, and finding it on day one instead of day six saves the most time. A turnover threshold, an accreditation or a level of insurance cover are common ones. For insurance, you do not need the cover in place to bid. Under the Procurement Act a buyer cannot require it before award; it can ask you to commit to having it when the contract starts, and will check it is in place before awarding.
Claude's table is a first pass. Check each line against the documents yourself. Where you are unsure what a requirement means, ask the buyer through the clarification route on their portal. Then put your real numbers to it:
Here is my actual staffing and what I can wait for payment. Tell me honestly what could make this contract a bad fit for a business like mine, and what you cannot judge from what I have told you.
Done when you have decided to bid or to skip it.
5. Price it. The buyer will usually give you a pricing schedule to fill in. Work it through with Claude:
Here is the pricing schedule and my costs: labour, materials, travel, overheads and the margin I want. Use only the figures I give you. Check the quantities against the tender, check how VAT should be shown, and check that the totals match what the written answers say.
Check the sums yourself as well. Done when the schedule is filled in and the totals agree everywhere they appear.
6. Draft the answers.
Right, I am bidding. Work through their question set, one question at a time. Give the question number and its exact word or character limit, or say if none is stated. For each, draft an answer using my answer bank, within that limit, answering every part of the question and addressing their scoring criteria specifically.
Where the answer bank does not cover it, do not invent anything. Tell me what you need from me and I will give it to you.
Keep the "do not invent anything" line in. Made-up detail in a public sector bid is a serious problem. It does not make the output safe, though. Missed requirements, wrong prices and a late submission matter too, so read every answer against the tender yourself. Check the word or character counts with your own word processor, make sure every sub-question is answered, and remove any placeholder text. Done when each answer is checked, within its limit and free of placeholders.
7. Submit. Read and complete every declaration (tick only what is true), attach the documents asked for, enter your answers in the buyer's fields, preview, press Submit, and save the confirmation with its date and time. You are done when you have that saved confirmation. Do this well before the deadline, because portals can be slow.
The parts that often carry weight
Two sections can carry a lot of marks, so follow the weighting the tender publishes.
Social value. In central government tenders it must carry at least ten per cent of the score, and some other public buyers weight it too. Buyers score specific actions you commit to during this contract. What you already do locally can show how you would deliver, but it does not replace a commitment for the contract itself. Where you employ local people, use local suppliers or take on apprentices, say what you would do on this contract, in the area it covers.
Using what you know about my business, draft the social value section. Suggest specific, achievable measures for this contract, with a date, who is responsible and what each would cost me. Only use facts I have given you. Mark anything you have assumed.
Check each measure is something you can afford to do. The official social value guide explains how buyers score it.
Case studies. You have done the work; you may just never have written it up. Pick jobs similar to the tender in size and type, and recent enough for what they ask. For each, gather the dates, what you did, the value, the result, and whether the client is happy to be a referee. Do three, once, and adapt them to each tender's format:
I am going to describe three jobs I have done. For each, write a case study in the format tenders usually want: the situation, what we did, what the outcome was, and what the client got out of it. Use only what I tell you, and ask me questions if I have left out something a buyer would want to know.
Done when you have three case studies you have read and approved.
A worked example: one answer, before and after
An invented example. Loddon Grounds Ltd is a made-up business.
The question. "Describe how you ensure work is done to a good standard. Maximum 150 words."
Before. The owner of a five-person grounds maintenance firm near Reading writes:
"We take quality very seriously and always do a good job. If there are any problems we sort them out."
A buyer has little to check there, so it gives a marker little to score.
What the owner tells Claude when interviewed. Each site has a written schedule agreed with the client. The team leader walks the site against it after each visit and takes dated photos, which go to the client the same day. If a client reports a problem, the firm goes back within two working days to look at it and records what it found and fixed. The team leader has twelve years' experience and holds the PA1 and PA6 pesticide certificates. The firm keeps the schedules, photos and a log of reported problems. It has no written complaints procedure yet, so Claude marks that as a gap.
After.
"Every site has a written schedule agreed with the client. After each visit the team leader walks the site against that schedule and takes dated photos, which we send to the client the same day. If a client reports a problem, we return within two working days to look at it and record what we found and fixed. Our team leader has twelve years' experience and holds the PA1 and PA6 pesticide certificates."
Every sentence in that comes from what the owner said, and a buyer can ask to see the schedules, photos and log behind it. The answer is 73 words, inside the 150 limit. It makes no promise about charges, because the owner did not give one.
A word on the ones you should not bid for
The temptation, once bidding gets cheaper, is to bid for everything. Do not. Time spent on a poor fit is time you do not have, even when the writing is fast. Winning something you cannot deliver profitably is worse, because it can cost you money and your reputation with that buyer.
A useful habit before committing is to run the checks in step 4 honestly, and to ask Claude:
Given my staffing, the area, the payment terms and the contract length, what are the three biggest risks of taking this on? Be blunt with me. I would rather skip it than bid badly.
Skip the contracts you cannot deliver profitably.
What good looks like after three months
A realistic pattern for a small firm that starts doing this, though yours may differ:
You spend an afternoon building the answer bank. You set up a saved search on Find a Tender for your category and area, and you look at it once a week over a coffee. Most weeks nothing fits. In our experience, for a typical small firm's category and area, something does every few weeks.
When it does, the go or no-go decision should take far less time than starting from scratch, and the bid should take hours rather than days, though you still need to check and submit it carefully. You may lose the first few. When a bid is lost, ask the buyer for feedback. Some buyers must give a summary of how you were assessed and some do not, so if none arrives, ask politely. The official guidance on assessment summaries explains who gets one. Give Claude the answer you submitted, the marking criteria and the feedback, then ask for proposed changes:
Here is the answer I submitted, the marking criteria and the feedback. Suggest edits to my answer bank in one list, and separately list anything the feedback says I would need to actually change in how I work. Do not change anything I have not approved.
Approve the edits before you replace the bank.
What this does not cover
Some things need you rather than drafting help.
Accreditation is one. Some tenders ask for ISO certification, Cyber Essentials or a specific safety scheme. Check whether the buyer accepts equivalents and when the requirement has to be met, because it may only be needed by award. Whether a certificate is worth the cost for the work you want is a commercial decision. The official guidance on conditions of participation sets out what buyers can ask for.
Frameworks are another. A framework is an agreement that approved suppliers can be called on under. Some open only occasionally, some reopen, and some dynamic markets can be joined at any time. Being on one does not promise any work. The official comparison explains the differences. Open tenders and supplier lists are simpler places to begin.
Written by SmartGenie in Reading, Berkshire. If you would rather have this set up and working on your own systems, that is what the SmartStart Pack does.
Save or share this guide