UK procurement guides
Comprehensive, practical guides for UK SMEs bidding for public sector work — the full journey from finding contracts to submitting a winning, compliant bid.
How to Win UK Public Sector Tenders: The Complete SME Guide
Winning public sector work as an SME is a repeatable process, not luck. This pillar guide walks the full journey — from finding the right contracts to submitting a compliant, high-scoring bid — and links to the detailed guides, templates and sector pages for each step.
Read guideUK Tender Compliance: The Complete Guide for SMEs
Compliance is where most SME tenders are won or lost — before a single word of the proposal is scored. This guide explains the universal gateways, the sector overlays, how to audit your own compliance footprint before a bid lands, and how to keep compliance from eating your bid-writing time.
Read guideHow to Win NHS Tenders: The Complete SME Guide
NHS procurement is the largest single buyer of services in the UK — but it is also the most heavily gated. This guide walks an SME through the full NHS tender journey: finding opportunities, qualifying, passing DSPT and CQC gateways, decoding the NHS Standard Contract, scoring on social value and submitting cleanly. Every step links to the deeper guide, tool or template you need next.
Read guideThe Bid/No-Bid Decision Framework: A Practical Guide for UK SMEs
Most UK SMEs do not lose tenders because they write badly — they lose them because they wrote at all. This framework is a 30-minute structured decision a bid team can run on any tender to decide whether to commit writing time, and to defend that decision to the MD afterwards.
Read guide