what you miss
Four ways to lose a job you never bid for.
Not whether the work suits you, but whether a submission would be read at all. Every notice we send you passed all four tests. Every notice you did not receive failed one — and unlike everyone else, we can tell you which.
Contractors talk about the tenders they lost. Almost nobody talks about the four that cost more, because they leave no paperwork: there is no losing letter for a notice you never saw, and no debrief for a bid that was thrown out on a rule.
Tend.ai is the only service in Botswana that rules on all four before a notice ever reaches you. Everything you are sent has passed them. Everything you were not sent failed one, and we will tell you which.
The job you were never told about
Every notice carries a work category, and your registration carries the categories you hold. Where they do not meet, a bid is not uncompetitive — it is not read. The expensive half of this is the other direction: notices you were entitled to bid for, in a category you forgot you hold.
Loss 02Right trade, wrong discipline
The cruellest one, because you are a builder and it is a building job. A sub-code names the specific discipline inside a category, and holding the parent is not holding the child. Firms prepare a whole submission before finding this out.
Loss 03Binned before anyone read it
A works grade caps the contract value you may bid for. Go over it and the submission is non-responsive — you have spent the preparation, and tied up the bid security, on an envelope that was never going to be opened on merit.
Loss 04Work your competitors cannot touch
The one that is good news. Thirteen category rows are reserved for 100% citizen-owned companies, and if that is you, the field is legally smaller than you think. Most contractors have never been told which thirteen.
A notice has to pass all four. The order does not matter, because failing any one of them makes a submission non-responsive rather than merely uncompetitive — and a person doing this by hand, from memory, at eleven at night, is checking none of them properly. What that person costs you.
stop losing them quietly