For manufacturers who bid locally
Nobody told you
which page cost you
the contract.
Public buyers score the documents you hand in. Not the plant, not the price list, not the twenty years.
Who this is for Manufacturers of 50 to 250 people who want a few contracts close to home.
Send one page from a tender you lost. No charge and no call.
- Method statement
- Quality plan
- Reference projects
- Environmental evidence
- Capability statement
- ESPD
01 the record
They were cheapest.
They were fastest.
They lost on five days.
P. Olesen og Sønner bid for a demolition contract in Denmark and lost it on when they said the quality-assurance paperwork would be handed over. Not on the work. On a date inside a document.
It makes no sense that so few days have had such great significance.
Klagenævnet for Udbud · J.nr. 25/03606 · 13 October 2025
02 the mechanism
The paperwork is a separate
object from the company.
An evaluator sits with a scoring template and your submission. What happens next is not a judgement about your firm.
- They award points for what is present, findable and specific
- They cannot award points for what you know and did not write down
- They are not permitted to
Scored on the documentation requirements rather than on the award criterion, and marked down for matters no documentation was asked for.
KOFA 2023/472 · Mesta AS mod Rogaland fylkeskommune
03 where the score is decided
Where price is the whole
score, stop reading.
Sometimes it really is price, and where it is, nothing here helps you. The tenders you bid sit somewhere on this range, and it is worth knowing where.
-
PriceLatvia, 2021 to 2023
73%
of procurements decided on lowest price alone. No document changes that.
-
MixEuropean Union, 2020
42%
of tenders score something besides price. You have never seen how much of yours does.
-
EnvironmentNorway, since 2024
30%
the minimum on climate and environmental criteria, or a place in the top three.
European Union, Konkurrence- og Forbrugerstyrelsen 2020 · Norway, anskaffelsesloven § 5 b, which took the rule over from forskriften § 7-9 on 1 July 2026 · Weighting rule, Directive 2014/24/EU Article 67(5)
If your losses are price losses and nothing else, this is the wrong page and I have nothing to sell you.
04 the thing itself
Written once, properly,
in the form an evaluator scores.
The set of things your firm asserts about itself, in the language of the template it will be read against.
- Capability, stated as what you have done rather than what you can do
- Process, in the detail a scoring template asks for
- Reference projects, with the specifics that make them count
- Environmental and quality evidence, as figures rather than adjectives
It is not a management system. Nothing changes in the workshop. The standard is a document, it belongs to you, and your own people edit it.
05 a finished sheet
This is the object
being scored.
06 what it costs you
Four hours.
You supply what already exists. I do the rest.
You send
- Past submissions, however they are filed
- Certificates and drawings you already hold
- Whatever you sent the last time you bid
- Two conversations of about ninety minutes
- One read-through at the end
I return
- Capability, stated as what you have done
- Process, in the detail a scoring template asks for
- Reference projects with the specifics that make them count
- Environmental and quality evidence as figures
- One revision round, included
I do not need you to prepare anything, and I am not going to ask you to fill in a questionnaire so that I can sell you the answers. If you have come out of a pre-tender dialogue feeling you gave away a day of free consulting, you know why that sentence is here.
07 the ladder
Every tier credits
into the one above it.
Walk the whole ladder and you pay €8,000 in total, not €11,000. Credits never expire.
Step one
One document
One document, done properly. The whole thing, however many pages it runs to, not a sample page.
- The full capability statement, reference sheet or tender annex
- The editable source file
- Print and screen exports, sized and named for tender portals
Credited in full into anything you buy after it.
The standard
The document standard
Every document that decides a bid, on one system your own people run.
- Templates for capability statements, reference sheets and tender annexes
- One document built end to end, plus file structure and naming
- The index. Every project, by client and year, ready at the next bid
- One revision round
All source files, yours to keep. Runs without a designer after handoff. Your €600 credited.
Beyond documents
Identity system
The document standard applied across the company.
- Colour and typographic system for print, screen and product
- Signage, vehicles, trade fair stands, product marking
- Written guidelines your suppliers can work from
- Wordmark or mark
This is the work I have done longest. It is still the last thing you should buy from me. Take it once the document standard has proved itself. Your €2,400 credited.
A Swedish bid consultancy publishes 15,000 kr excluding VAT for a single draft of a single bid, delivered as a Word file. Roughly what the full standard costs here, and theirs expires the day that tender closes.
08 doing nothing
Plenty of firms have stopped
bidding. They were right to.
A Swedish firm said it to a trade body survey with pride rather than regret. We manage without them, we get paid in full by private clients, completely without hassle. Public work argues about scope and costs a week of unpaid writing before anyone looks at your price.
Participation, Företagarna · Bidders per procedure, European Court of Auditors, Special Report 28/2023
The field is thinning, and it is thinning for the reason above. Firms are leaving because the paperwork became unreasonable, not because they stopped being able to do the work.
Everyone who withdraws
hands their share to whoever
can still produce the documents.
You bid three times a year, and that does not need to change. Bidding more is not the offer. The offer is that the few you do bid stop being lost on the part nobody explained to you.
09 questions
Questions you should ask me.
Can I check the numbers on this page?
All of them, and here is where. The Danish ruling is published under J.nr. 25/03606 and the Norwegian one under KOFA 2023/472, both searchable by case number. The rule that a buyer must publish the weighting is Article 67(5) of Directive 2014/24/EU. The fall from 5.7 to 3.2 bidders per procedure is the European Court of Auditors, Special Report 28/2023, which puts single bidding at 23.5% of procedures in 2011 against 41.8% in 2021. The 42% is the complement of the figure the Danish competition authority publishes for the rest of the EU, where tenders weighting price alone average 58%. Norway's 30% moved from anskaffelsesforskriften § 7-9 into anskaffelsesloven § 5 b on 1 July 2026 and applies from 500,000 kroner. The 15,000 kr comparison is a published list price from a Swedish bid consultancy, for drafts of the texts and attachments a bid needs, delivered as Word files. Every number on this page is one you can look up, and if you find one that is wrong I would rather hear it from you than not.
Is this a quality management system?
No, and it is the wrong thing to compare it to. A management system changes how you work and then asks you to keep proving that you do. This is a document. Nothing in the workshop changes, nobody is audited, and there is no annual renewal. If a supplier has told you that complicated quality management systems are an unreasonable requirement, they were right, and this is not one.
What happens if my losses really are about price?
Then you have wasted a page and I have wasted an afternoon, which is the whole reason the first step is free. Send a page from a tender you lost. If it comes back scored and the score was fair, you have your answer and it did not cost you anything to get it.
Who actually does the work?
I do. There is no team behind this page and no account manager. That is a real constraint and it is why the engagement is four hours of your time rather than a project, and why there is a limit to how many of these run at once.
Do you have clients I can speak to?
Not yet in this segment, and I am not going to invent one. That is a fair reason to start with the free scored page rather than with €2,400, and it is the honest reason the ladder starts where it does.
Do you work outside the Nordics?
The work is built around Finnish, Swedish, Norwegian and Danish procurement practice, and that is where I can be useful today. Elsewhere in the EU is a direction rather than a readiness claim I will make now.
For manufacturers who bid locally
Nobody told you
which page cost you
the contract.
Send one page from a tender you lost. A method statement, a quality section, a capability answer. Whatever you would have to write again next time.
It comes back scored against the criteria it was judged on, with the points located and the reasoning written out.
No charge. No call. Before you spend €2,400 finding out, spend nothing.