2 heads can be better than one

I was interested to hear about Skillfair member Rob Watling's experience of looking for someone to join their bid team. I often hear people say "I would have gone for that project but I think I'm too small/haven't got 3 years accounts/we're missing one small area of expertise' etc." so why not give co-bidding a whirl?

Rob needed someone with specific skills to bid with him on a piece of work - he advertised his requirements on Skillfair and in his words "We had 6 replies, 3 of them good enough to keep the details on file, and one of these good enough to include on this bid. So thanks. We wouldn't have been bidding otherwise."

Has anyone else had any experience of this?

Average consultant fee rates increase by 7.5%

I've just finished analysing and writing up the results of our 5th Anuual survey of consultancy fee rates. Slightly to my surprise the results show that rates are up 7.5% on this time last year.

Given that I've heard from consultants that there are newly self-employed people on the market willing to work for ridiculously low rates (£200 for 'management consultancy is surely silly!) has made me wonder what this really means.

A key factor that emerged in the survey is that most of our consultants do most of their work directly for clients - cutting out agencies and other intermediaries - and I think this may explain why the rates they're reporting are holding up so well. What does anyone else think?

Full survey results are here

A different use for Tender Alerts

Speaking to David Seacombe today about Skillfair and the way he uses the web site brought up some interesting comments. He said "We are finding Skillfair a really useful service but not in the way that most people will probably think of using it. The daily alerts are great, but most of them are for work that is already well defined. Aston Beck is a specialist management consultancy – we tend to get involved earlier in the process – when the client is not yet sure what the challenge is, yet alone the solution.

What we do is use these tender alerts to give us a "reason to call" possible partners and maintain a dialogue with prospective clients. Most people involved in business development of any sort will agree that this is a most valuable asset; if you don't have a good reason to call a client or prospect then it is unlikely that the relationship will be maintained."

It's certainly much easier to call a client or prospect if you have an interesting tidbit of information for them - or better still can ask for their advice about something as almost everyone loves to be able to give an opinion!

Does anybody win tenders

There are lots of public tenders available and because they're public a lot of companies bid for them. Skillfair members often want to know if small consultancies or individuals ever actually win them.

The short answer is "Yes, they do!"  - but being successful in a formal tender process requires careful thought and some hard work. Those people who regularly win tenders tell us that the most important thing is to only bid for those tenders where you are really well suited to the project. Putting in lots of bids when your company is only just suitable or where the requirements are too vague means you'll be competing with lots of others and won't be able to make your bid stand out from the crowds.

Seeing the wood for the trees

When you're entering information a website to publicise your business, sometimes it's easy to miss the obvious. Quite by chance this week one of our members called up about a tender and happened to mention that they run a translation service. As we have a client looking for a Japanese speaking recruitment consultant Angela asked if they knew anyone suitable.

It then turned out that although the members skill profile included Translation and Interpreting they hadn't actually entered skills for all the languages they cover - so hadn't received an alert about that particular project.

I think the moral is you should always ask a 3rd party to give your website and other web profiles the once over as they are likely to spot things that you're too close to the business to see!