"What's the beef?"

Public Sector Procurement. Discuss.

Recently, we expressed our interest in a UK public sector creative services tender. On receiving the pre-qualification criteria, we realised that we didn’t have the financial track record required, so highlighted to the government body running the tender that by only accepting submissions from agencies with five year’s client history and financial accounts they were missing the boat. By return, as long as we could substantiate our claims in all the other creative areas, they invited us to submit anyway. So, because of our long list of relevant clients and proven competency, we did.

Anyway, Like the Murphy’s, and to cut the story short, we are not bitter about not getting through, what we are pissed off about is the response we received.

Being a small, start-up consultancy, time is of course money to us. And taking time to put together a bespoke tender is unfortunately the nature of the beast — but, on receiving a very generic ‘thanks, but no thanks, but we liked your work’ email I must admit to seeing red.

Writing back, I explained our position as a young, fresh and hungry consultancy, where feedback would really help us to fine tune any future submissions and evolve as a business — especially after we had dedicated two days to responding to their brief.

The response was less than helpful I can tell you.

I wonder, with the continual industry chat about the value that creativity and design gives back to the UK’s economy, a slightly better response might have been, “Thank you for taking the time to submit, and sorry you didn’t make the grade, here is a copy of our checklist to explain why.”

Guess what our first question will be before we even read the next Pre-Qual. that comes through?!

Grrr!