Transcript: Unlocking Social Procurement Opportunities: Two-part workshop series | workshop 1

Music playing for opening of session: Money Money Money by ABBA - Isolated Piano and Keyboards by The Keyboard Chronicles.

Athanasia Price: Hello everyone. Who doesn't like a bit of ABBA to get you into a webinar? Thank you for joining our third open learning session for this year. It's part of the Social Enterprise Development Initiative or we call it, SEDI. 

My name is Athanasia Price. I'm from Social Enterprise Australia. Now one of the key asks from our social enterprise sector here in Australia was for more opportunities for peer learning and these open learning sessions are one space where people in the sector can share their experiences, their knowledge, and their skills with each other.

I'm really excited to welcome today's speakers, three change-makers in the world of social procurement. We have for you:

•  Elisabeth Lette, Director of ArcBlue 
• Thomas Pollock, Founder and CEO of Gov Ready and,
• Adele Laughton, CEO of Queensland Social Enterprise Council.

Their experiences span both government and non-government procurement frameworks locally, nationally and globally. Before I hand over to this amazing team to talk procurement readiness, I would definitely like to acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the unceded lands from which we are all joining.

I am coming to you from beautiful Quandamooka Country, on a very lovely sunny day. Wynnum in Queensland. I pay my respects to the Elders, past and present. I recognise their continuing connection to the waters, sky, and Country on this beautiful place I have the privilege of living and working on. I'm thankful for the living knowledges, strength and wisdom that they share with generations of cultural holders.

I also extend that respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people joining us today and recognise that with you, you bring 65,000 years of systems thinking and relational care for people and planet. So, thank you.

And now it is a great pleasure to hand over to Adele and her co-collaborators Elisabeth and Thomas. 

Adele Laughton: Thanks Athanasia and thanks for a really beautiful Acknowledgement of Country. I'm coming from Meanjin today in Brisbane and I'm really excited for this webinar.

QSEC had the privilege of having Elisabeth and Thomas do a workshop for us last year on social procurement. It was an in-person workshop. It was really informative and we had such amazing feedback from social enterprises that we obviously wanted to bring this online today so that everybody could also benefit from their expertise.

I'm going to allow Elisabeth and Thomas to introduce themselves so they can tell you where they're from, the roles they’re in and the experience they bring to this sector. So I'll start with you, Elisabeth.

Elisabeth Lette: Thank you Adele and welcome everyone today to the workshop. Really excited to be able to have a conversation with you all here today and share some of our insights and experience to see how we can build social procurement capability or procurement capability across the social enterprise sector.

As Adele mentioned, my name's Elisabeth Lette, I'm the Director for ArcBlue in Queensland/Northern Territory. ArcBlue, if you aren't aware of who we are as an organisation, we are a specialist procurement consultancy and provide a whole range of procurement support services to organisations across the spectrum. Across the entire economic spectrum from local small businesses working in regional communities, and social enterprises, through to large corporate private sector organisations.

With that breadth of experience and industry exposure, it means that I've got a pretty good understanding of all aspects of procurement from small to large and hope that that experience brings insights today that will help you find your place in that procurement ecosystem.

Personally, I also bring experience from having worked quite extensively within public sector organisations prior to joining ArcBlue, including spending a significant amount of time in the Victorian Government working on the Victorian Government's social procurement policies. So I also have an understanding of the government landscapes and that broader environment that you might be grappling with as well. Over to you Thomas.

Thomas Pollock: Thanks Elisabeth, that was awesome. Thanks for having me everyone, this is awesome. I'm really happy to be here. I love getting the opportunity to help social enterprises. I'm a big fan of yours. If there was a definition of a good business in the dictionary it should say, "See social enterprises." Hopefully I'll get a chance to meet a few of you over the coming months and years.

Where do I come from? Why am I here? My background very quickly: I was General Manager of a professional services firm back in the early 2000s. The only sector we weren't doing any business with was government. I spent the next 3.5 - 4 years (yes, I had a very patient boss) targeting the government and trying to unpack what they look for in their SME providers, suppliers, and partners. Eventually, I pieced together the puzzle, got our first contract and within two years 30% of our total revenue was coming out of the government sector. We then expanded into big business. 

Fast forward to 2017. I always wanted to be an author. I thought, what do I know that a lot of SME owners don't? And that is how to unpack government, how to get into big business and government opportunities. I wrote my book, got it published, and from there, Gov Ready was born. I love what we do. We only work with small to medium-sized businesses and help them get ready and positioned for government and big business contracts. Then help them engage the correct way with decision makers and buyers.

It’s really cool. Love what we do. And that's pretty much us. Thanks, Adele. 

Adele Laughton: Yeah, cheers. Our experience at QSEC is that getting ready phase. Getting businesses to understand what it's like to get ready for procurement and all of the steps that sit before actually tendering. So we'll go through a lot of that today. We'll kick off with you, Thomas.

Thomas Pollock: Righty. So before I get into some other detail, I thought it was important to show you the overall opportunity available, and I'm not just talking to social enterprise here. Forgive me, if you hear me say government, I want you to insert big business there as well. They look for similar aspects, similar characteristics in businesses that they want to partner with from a small and medium business perspective.

The opportunity is huge. All right, total public sector procurement. What I mean by total public sector procurement. This is every council in Australia, every state government in Australia, and of course our federal government as well.

They procure products and services in excess of $600 billion every 12 months. So this is a huge market to play in. Traditionally, this is where your big business, they suck up a lot of this money. But since COVID a lot of the rules have been changed for the government and private sector. Government definitely, the private sector are certainly the big businesses, following along with the lead the government's taken. So the first thing I want you to understand is there is no bigger market for you to tap into. Big business, they procured over the 2022/2023 period an average of $302 billion every year in procuring products and services. 

One example, when the Olympics were announced, which was a huge, huge thing in Queensland, Treasury came out and they discussed that they're looking at $180 billion, in excess of $180 billion. My contacts in government believe, I've been told that it's going to be a lot more than that, but we'll see.

If you're not in Queensland, you certainly still can bid for Queensland contracts and Olympic contracts as well. Do not think that you can't. And there is a huge opportunity here for social enterprises and SMEs across the board. So hopefully that gives you a bit of an idea. 

So for social enterprises, I'm looking at opportunities now in FY24 that were targeted towards social enterprises, which is $257 million of spend. So a lot of your big boys there, your Downers, your Westpacs and that, they're all spending in excess of $1 million, or have done year on year over the last couple of years with social enterprises. So that's important to note. And look, $257 million is not a bad number.

So, I've actually met with a few social enterprises who have come to us and want us to help them, accelerate them into government contracts. And it's always an education piece with them early on because what they're looking at doing, a lot of social enterprises, is targeting those opportunities which have already been designated as specific for social enterprises. And that's okay, but that's the $257 million pool that we just looked at. And what we preach to our social enterprise clients when we sit them down is, happily, you can do that if you like, but you are a business, first and foremost, you are a business.

And the opportunities for smaller and medium-sized businesses, especially since COVID, the opportunities to embed themselves into government and big business supply chains, I'm not going to say it's easy but you get the readiness piece right, then the opportunities are in excess of $900 billion every year.

Our goal, for every social enterprise that we work with, we don't want them actually fishing just in the social enterprise opportunities. We want them fishing in the larger pools with local, state and federal government. And that's really important, it's a really important takeaway.

But don't just restrict yourself to those specific social enterprise opportunities. You are probably a small to medium-sized business, if you are an SME there are many incentives in place to help you compete against much bigger companies in order to secure some government contracts.

A competitive advantage. You guys have a massive competitive advantage, right? You aren't just a business, you also solve social and environmental problems. And that's a really important thing to know.

From my experience and I don't have a huge amount of experience, we've dealt with a handful of social enterprises, so it's not a real good sample, but again, on those early introductions and those early meetings, quite often they were telling us about all the good they were doing, but they weren't actually telling us about how good a business they are.

And that's a really important thing to note. You are a social enterprise because you deliver value as well as impact. And that sets you apart from most, if not all other SMEs out there and a lot of big businesses out there as well.

So you deliver value and impact. Hopefully I don't offend anyone here. When partnering with government or big business, it's important to note that they're looking at the value you bring to their organisation first. They want you there. They need to know that you can actually fulfil the work. They need to know that you have the capabilities. They need to know that you have the things and systems in place in order for them to give you X dollar amount of contract. All right?

The huge value to government and big business in partnering with you, embedding you in their supply chains is that you also bring impact with everything you do, whether it's, you know, for the government entities or big business entities.

You need to be seen as a valuable and attractive supplier for government. You need to be a valuable and attractive business first. Then you have a massive competitive advantage because once you can prove that you have the capabilities and you can do the work, then the impact that you bring with the work that you do creates massive ripple effects. And government and big business, they're the types of SMEs they're looking to embed into their supply chains.

There's two areas the government or big business, a lot of the time they look for in their SME partners. First one is the readiness and the second one is the engagement. I'm just going to speak to a bit of the engagement piece. You might be aware that every government; local government, state government and federal government, release their tenders and market tenders and opportunities via a tender platform.

So the government identifies a problem and they can't solve it themselves. For example, Queensland Government, they'll go out to QTenders or VendorPanel and they'll go to market and say, “We need 5,000 PPE units, who can help us? Here's the tender documents, go crazy and fill them in.” There's a lot of smaller businesses, though SMEs in particular, who believe that, most or all government opportunities are released by those different platforms, buy NSW or QTenders, VendorPanel, and so on and so forth. You need to be aware that only 15% of government opportunities are actually released via those platforms. 

So if you're sitting there thinking you'll get that email every day from buy NSW saying here are the tenders that we're releasing today, if you're interested, click on the link and you'll get the documentation, etc, if that's what you're relying on, then you're only getting a pretty small piece of the picture. 

Now government buy in many different ways. They don't want to have to go to market unless they absolutely have to. It costs them hundreds of thousands of dollars every time they release a tender. They don't want to go out there, so they've got panel arrangements, pre-qualified panel arrangements. Panel arrangements and also BAU. The BAU really important this one, because BAU is what big business doesn't care about. 

So business as usual for a government entity, they usually have a ceiling, a figure that if it's below a certain figure, dollar amount, they don't have to go to market, they don't have to go anywhere. They'll give these pieces of work to the businesses that they know, or that they know of, or that they know can do good work. So BAU, business as usual. Queensland Government, that's any product or service that costs less than $10,000. So I don't know whether, how many businesses in this room have products or services that cost less than $10,000, but I would dare say there's probably a large percentage of them. BAU. 

Back in the day, when we were targeting government, back in the early 2000s, when I gave you that little story at the start, when we were winning contracts, about 40% of our revenue, government revenue in particular, came from BAU. Much smaller amounts, they pay on credit cards. Smaller pieces of work. Happy days. 

Who is this work going to? The BAU work is going to the businesses that have made themselves known to the right decision makers, whether it be in a big business or in the government sector. There's more to unpack there, but the point I'm trying to make is I want you to be aware of, if you're sitting on those tender alert systems, you're only getting 15% of the picture. You're missing 85%. 

Networking when possible. Again, a need to know, government buyers need to know the problem you solve. Go where? Government. The government puts on a lot of different networking events and guess who they normally bring along with them? Who's normally sponsoring the event or is there as well? A lot of big businesses. So every government puts on a lot of different networking events and I would encourage you once a month to try and go along to these because this is where you'll start finding out about opportunities.

You'll start meeting buyers, you'll start meeting decision-makers. Having said that, there will be events that you'll walk away from and you'll curse me and say, "Tom, there's two hours of my life I'll never get back". So, I'm sorry, but there will be other ones that you'll walk away from thinking “Great, I made some really good contacts there”.

So networking is important when you're starting that engagement process. And the 3% rule, this is an unwritten rule in the government world, procurement world, they only need your product or service 3% of the time, okay? So 97% of the time, they don't need you, they don't want you, but they need to know you exist. All right? 

So the problem that's happened, this has been an ongoing issue. And I know because I've got hundreds of government contacts in my network. Whenever a business, particularly the SMEs, get in front of a government buyer, they will give them the hard pitch. They'll give them the hard sell. We're the greatest at this, we're giving all this back etc, etc. You got to buy from us and this is why etc. Now what that's turned into is white noise. As soon as you're hard-selling the government buyers, they'll put you in the basket of everyone else who's just trying to feed off a government contract. We need to use the math here, right? If there's a 97% chance that they do not need your product or service right now, then why pitch them? Why sell them? They absolutely do need to know that you're around, right? Because there's, what, something like 2.2 million SMEs in Australia. So they need to know who you are, they need to know that you exist, and they need to know the problem you solve, but they do not need to be sold.

I promise you, if you give it to buyers, if you give them the pitch in the first three minutes you've met them, you'll lose them straight away. So, yes, need to know the problem you solve and the problem you solve, right? It's not that we make the best widgets, we've got the greatest guarantee, or we give back the biggest impact or anything like that, Right? 

I'll give you a quick example. Wemo. The problem they solve is "We give people back their weekends." I'll give you 10 seconds to think about what Wemo does.

All they do is mow lawns. Do a bit of landscaping and mow lawns. They have a beautiful problem statement. I'm a father of three, some whole weekends I want to spend shipping them around different sporting events, doing all that sort of stuff. Wemo solves the problem of time, all right? They just so happen to mow lawns as well. 

This is not an easy exercise, we get every single one of our clients to sit down in a room with a whiteboard to roundtable, to summarise what your business does. The problem you solve in one short, succinct sentence is not an easy exercise. Branding experts will charge you thousands for it. But it's really important. And that problem, that core problem you solve, that's what we need every single buyer to know about you.

Adele Laughton: Thomas, we had a question from an attendee. When you say first and foremost a business, make sure that you're first and foremost a business, then go into your impact. What exactly do you mean by that?

Thomas Pollock: Yeah, great question. So the best way to do that is by providing evidence that you have the capability to fulfil the service or product or deliver the product that your business specialises in. You need to be a trusted business.

You need to be able to explain or to show the government that, when we tell you that we can deliver 5000 widgets next week and they're going to be quality widgets and they're going to be fantastic, and exactly what you need, they need to know that you can actually do that. Evidence is one way of doing that. Case studies, testimonials, awards. I think QSEC even have their own internal awards as well. It's amazing.

You know, government buyers, when they hit your website, these are the things they're looking for. You don't know when they're going to hit your site. The site is the biggest key asset that you have in your business, your website, and as much evidence as you can have in that, without cluttering up your whole website.

But that evidence will show buyers when they hit your site. Wait a minute. Hey, they've got quality assurance in place here. They've got these policies as well, that we really like. They've got these policies in place and look at these case studies. They've done this work, similar work for these organisations in the past. Oh and fantastic, here's the impact that they bring every time that we potentially use them as a supplier. We could talk about that for the next couple of hours, but hopefully Adele, that gives you a bit of a summary and you might want to add to that as well. 

Adele Laughton: No, no, no, totally agree. It's like anybody, you're trying to find and work with someone new, you're looking to see;

• Have they worked with people of a similar size before? 
• Have they delivered a similar contract size? 

You know, you're new to government, you're new to corporate buyers, they're basically sense-checking whether you can deliver the project, whether you've got the capability.

Thomas Pollock: Evidence as well. We are talking about evidence. So I’ve already talked about evidence, but there's:

• Third-party endorsements awards
• Government supplier awards
• Queensland government supplier have their own awards.
• Each state have their own awards
• Testimonials

Get them on your website. I don't know how many clients we've talked to over the last four years and asked “Has your business won any awards?” and they've gone, yeah, we've won this, this, this and this. Why isn't it on your website? You know, get it on there. It builds trust, it builds credibility. The evidence builds trust, builds credibility. Small business bonus points, right? That's our term. It's not a government or a big business term. 

Back in the day, this is in early 2000 when we were bidding for government work, there's a little box on the front page of every tender and it says, “Are you a small business?”. In the government's eyes, you have less than 20 staff. I would always say, "No, no, no, we're not a small business", because I didn't want them to think we were risky or thought they'd think we were too small to deliver etc, etc. It was going to go against us. What I didn't know then, it took me about four years before I got told this by one of my government guys, is that every time I didn't tick that box I was doing our business out of 5 to 10% weighting in our favour before they even read our assessment. Right?

So government have an incentive in place to try and level the playing field, and every time we didn't tick that box, through my stupidity, we were doing ourselves out of 5 to 10%. Now when you look at tender responses there are several boxes. One day soon I expect that there'll be a box there saying, are you a social enterprise? In fact, some tenders coming out now are explicitly saying, we want social enterprises to bid for these contracts, for this particular tender. 

If you are a women-led or women majority-owned business, tick that box on the front of the submission. If you are a First Nations business, tick that box on the front of the submission. If you're a small business, tick the box. If you're a regional business, tick that box. And hopefully, I reckon 12 months, if there's a box there that says, are you a social enterprise? Tick that box. So don't do what I did because if you can tick three or four of those boxes, you could get 25 to 30% weighting in your favour before they even read the first word of your response, and that's a huge advantage.

A few things you need to be aware of, 60% of tender responses do not conform. Which means if they don't conform, you've broken a government rule. I'll explain, I'll give you an extreme version of it. The takeaway here is to do what they say. Do what they say. Use the forms that they tell you to. 

Let's say in a tender it says “in 300 words or less, tell us about your business”, and you do that, but you use 301 words, extreme example, but you don't conform there. They don't need to read the rest of your tender. Why? Because they want a level playing field, and if they give you 301 words and everyone else has 300, it's not a level playing field.

Cooperative bids can definitely win. Big business does this really well, small business, not so. We missed out on millions of dollars worth of contracts back in the day because we'd look at it and say, we can only do 50% of this. Didn't bother about it. What we didn't know then was we could actually build a cooperative bid. Here in this group, you've got partners in this room right now who compliment you but don't compete, who can help bid with you for a government contract. And government love cooperative bids because 44 cents in every dollar that a small business makes stays in the local community and that's big. Big business is about a cent. So if they award a contract to a partner bid or a cooperative bid, happy days. 

Mandatory, doesn't always mean mandatory. Every government submission in particular, will have mandatory requirements, you must have this, you must have that. There is a grey area, which does my head in because I love words, and mandatory to me is one of the most black and white words you can come across. But it's not. 

Quick example, I'll give you. They say you need $50 million of public liability insurance if you're going to be successful for this tender. You look at that and go, there's no way we're going to buy that now because we don't need it. Most small businesses don't. In order to get around that, you could get a quote from an insurance company with pricing there and a little line in there saying, should we be successful for tender xyz456, we will execute this contract and purchase the insurance.

Case studies and your impact, that's really important for you guys, especially your impact, but don't just focus on the impact. Focus on how good your business is at delivering that particular product or service that you specialise in. That's so, so, so important.

Adele Laughton: Thomas, I have a question. Someone's asking, would the legal structure matter? So if you're a sole trader compared to a company, would they prefer a company over a sole trader? So does the legal structure of your organisation influence the outcome of a tender or how you can apply?

Thomas Pollock: Yeah, good question. In the real short, quick response. If you're a sole trader, you can still win contracts. A lot of our clients are sold traders and they win contracts, they're just smaller contracts. If you're a sole trader, and you're bidding for a $5 million piece of work, that's going to go against you. But you're a sole trader bidding for a $50 thousand contract you've got as good a chance as everyone as long as you can prove capability. We are a good business. We can do what we say we can. And here's our evidence, to back that up.

A few reasons why tenders lose. You don't answer all the questions. Answer every single question. It's really weird. Sometimes you'll have in a tender, you'll have to answer what seems to be the same question four different times. Back in the day, eventually I got sick of it when we were failing, and I said, the fourth time I was asked “see the answer to question 3b.” it's the same response. Non-conforming tender, we were out straight away because we didn't answer the question. 

Evidence. I've harped on that enough. A lot of businesses, particularly SMEs focus on what you do and not how it benefits the client. Turn that around, focus on how you can help the client, how your solution can benefit the client and don't focus so much on the impact side of things. The impact, definitely they need to know about it, but first and foremost they want to know that you can solve their problem.

And if you lose, demand a debrief. These are really powerful. The government won't tell you about this, but if you lose, demand a debrief. Politely say “We'd love to find out why we didn't win this particular tender. Could we get a debrief, please?” but demand the debrief. You can get a lot of intel from those debriefs which are going to help you out for your next submission to the government.

Adele Laughton: We often get feedback on behalf of social enterprises as well. So if you haven't tendered before and you're new and you feel a little bit uncomfortable reaching out to the government department to get feedback, usually your state peak or your national peak can reach out if they've got that relationship. So there are definitely ways to get feedback so that you can improve your chances next time. And you obviously want that because you want to unpack why you weren't successful and to double down on Thomas's answers because I get feedback all the time on behalf of members.

They don't answer all the questions. So you just cannot leave a question open even if it's not applicable to your organisation, just explain why that question is not applicable to what you do. But you must answer all of the questions on those tender applications. 

Thomas Pollock: That is so cool that QSEC can do that on your behalf as well and get some of that feedback, but I encourage you to be involved in the process. That is really valuable.

QSEC, Adele and the QSEC team, probably have connections at a much higher level in government than most people in this room are going to get so they can get the answers that perhaps you might not be able to get yourself. I don't know. But really great that they can advocate for you guys as well.

Website, basically, your website is the biggest asset that you have. Really important, keep it simple and have the evidence on your website that you can deliver, that you are capable and that you can deliver. And don't just focus on how you're impacting, you're giving back. Certainly needs to be there though.

Thank you. I'll hand it over to the awesome Elisabeth. 

Elisabeth Lette: Okay, great. Thank you, Thomas. 

I'm going to cover some content that might be similar to what Thomas has also touched on, but also just trying to add a practical procurement lens.

What I'm going to try and do now is really building on what Thomas has already shared, give you a couple of practical tips to hopefully take away today so that if you are considering whether to respond to any opportunities, this will help you, what we would say frame your story or frame your tender response.

This advice will apply regardless of whether you are a social enterprise or what you would call mainstream business, a large private sector organisation. This is the advice that I give to all of my clients, but it's also the advice that I applied myself. So in my role at ArcBlue we often submit what I would call proposals to businesses to provide them with services, or we frequently respond to tender opportunities that are coming from either private sector organisations or government or public sector organisations. And the framework that we apply in preparing those tender responses, it can be distilled down to what I would call these three P's.

First of all, consider your position. Where do you see yourself playing on a commercial playing field? And by commercial playing field, I mean a competitive business environment where you are offering some goods or some services for a fee that you hope to earn some revenue from.

So, again building on a point that Thomas made earlier, you're operating in a commercial space so your social impact is very important, but at the end of the day you are a business, you are a commercial entity, you are trading to make a profit and you need to decide what your position in that commercial playing field is.

The second P that we talk about is your pitch. So what is the good or the service that you're going to offer that can meet some buyers' needs? And then finally, what can you do to demonstrate that you can perform, that you can provide that service, that you can meet the need and that you've got the evidence to show?

So we'll talk a bit about case studies, references, feedback, testimonials, all of those things that Thomas spoke about being really important to pitch on your website so that people can go, yeah, this organisation, they can perform, they can do the job that I want them to, and hey, they can prove it too.

So just unpacking that first one, position. So as a business, the ball's in your court. You need to decide what it is that you offer, what's your service or what's your good, and who are you selling it to.

And to put it in some pretty plain terms, what do you offer? Let's say, I sell blue pens. Who do I sell blue pens to? I sell blue pens and I sell blue pens to school children and I sell blue pens to school children because I know that high school students need to do exams and they need to write in blue pen. I've got a very deliberate product and I know who I'm going to sell it to. 

But then I might need to think, oh, actually, you know, do I just want to sell blue pens or what if I've seen out there that there's a need for blue and black pens? But hey, I've only got blue ink. But Thomas over here, he sells black pens as well. So maybe Thomas and I can partner together and maybe we could have a better offering for all those school children if we could partner together, pool our resources and we can offer a combination of the blue and the black pens together.

Does that mean that collectively we can offer something bigger and broader that might be more appealing to others? Do you see what I mean? It's about understanding, first up:

• What have you got? 
• What's your good or what's your service? 
• Who are you going to offer it to and, 
• Where might you sit, in that service or that good need?

Now, sometimes we find that the organisations that you're selling to, blue or black pens, might have their own rules that they need to apply. If I go back to my school children example, and this is literal because I've got a daughter who's doing grade 12 exams at the moment. She came to me yesterday and said, "Mum, I've got to have a blue pen and I've got to take it to school and it's got to be a three-point tip for this exam." So the buyer, or in this case the school kid, might have some rules around how they need to operate as well.

Make sure that when you're considering what you know, what your good is or what your service is that you're selling or that you want to offer, that you also understand, well, what are the rules of play that the people that I'm looking to sell my service to? What are the rules of play that they might need to operate in?

Now, when we talk about social enterprises, and this is the point of difference that Thomas was talking about earlier, you create important social or environmental impact. That is at the core of what makes you a social enterprise and what makes you different from any other commercial organisation. So it is going to be very important for you and for everyone in this room today that in deciding where you sit and how you position yourselves, those values that are true to you, that you hold true to yourself as an organisation, whether that be your social impact or your environmental impact, they are going to be important to you and the type of work that you do and the type of organisations that you associate with.

Sometimes in deciding what your position on a playing field is, you might need to consider, not just what do I sell and who do I want to sell it to? You might also want to consider, are those organisations aligned to who I am or are they aligned to the values that my organisation and my social enterprise represent?

As an example, if I was selling blue pens and black pens, and I knew that there was a market out there to sell those to a whole range of different schools, and there was one school over here that had a really poor public reputation around waste and had been in the media and was effectively a really strong poor reputation around their environmental credentials, I might make a deliberate and planned decision that from a values perspective, I didn't want to sell to that organisation.

So, in deciding what your position is and who you are and who you want to interact with, it's really important before you start putting the time or the energy and the effort into selling your good or service, that you've considered all of these factors around:

• who you are, 
• what you've got to offer, 
• who your target audience is, 
• why they're your target audience, and 
• are they aligned to who you want to be as an organisation and 
• who you want to associate yourself with?

Okay, so the second P is the pitch. And this becomes important in being able to articulate, and by articulate I mean to talk to, but also to write, to put down on paper if you're responding to a tender opportunity. And this is. How do you tell your story? So quite often a tender, and this will be, whether it's a public sector tender or a private sector tender, it will come out and it will have a very clear scope, and it might say something like, "I need 100 boxes of blue pens." And then as an opening question, it might say, “Describe your ability to deliver blue pens”. So if I was answering that question, it would be very important that I, number one, address the need that the question, that the scope or the tender is asking for.

They have quite clearly told me they need 100 boxes of blue pens. If I was writing a response to that, I wouldn't lead with I am a social enterprise that employs people with disability and as part of our mission we build packs of stationary supplies, of which some are blue pens, some are black pens, but they're all really great pens because they help people with disability.

Not in any way intending to cause offence here, or in any way intending to diminish the value that the social enterprises might provide in that example. But what I am suggesting is the tender has asked for 100 boxes of blue pens.

What you need to lead with is I am an organisation that has an established production line for delivering blue pens and, and have been doing this for the past 10 years. So you are leading with your ability to deliver the good or service that that provider, that buyer wants.

There might be opportunity within that tender document, within that tender request, and this is a common request, a common question that we see, to describe what makes you different from other providers. This is where, and Thomas mentioned earlier, this is where your social impact or your social enterprise pitch can really add value because that's what makes you different from, say, the Officeworks down the road or the newsagent down the road that can deliver those blue or black pens.

The fact that you provide that social impact, that's the added value or the differentiating factor, and it is very important. The opportunity is often there in these tender documents, in these tender reforms to articulate that. But what I would say is, that's your added value or your differentiating factor. It's not your lead pitch that you're going in with.

Performing, this is where, as part of tender documents, you'll often be asked for past capability, past experience, and past track record of ability to deliver. And this is where it's really important that you understand what you're being asked to deliver against the contract and where's your evidence of where you might have done that previously.

We spoke a bit earlier about case studies and testimonials. They are, I would say they're a core part of doing business for any organisation, whether you're a social enterprise or a large private sector provider. Understand what you do, have the evidence to back it up, and every time you deliver against a contract, ask that supplier you're working with, ask those organisations that you're working with for a reference or a testimonial. Would they be willing to be named in other tender documents, in other tender responses, as a referee to attest to the good work that you have done because that's what helps you gain traction in future responses?

What we often see is a common question: “Give us three examples of case studies of where you have delivered this good or service before” and what ArcBlue as an organisation does, and what we encourage all of our clients to do is to get into the habit of every time you do a piece of work to write up a short case study.

What I've done here is just include an example of what a really short case study template could look like. This is the format that we use whenever we do case studies. Give the name of the project that you worked on and just in a couple of short sentences saying who the client was, what you did, how you went about it and what was the outcome.

For example, QSEC, Adele engaged me to provide 100 boxes of blue pens. The client, the situation is, QSEC needed 100 boxes of blue pens. ArcBlue provided these on a 24-hour basis and we were able to provide them in a way that met QSEC's needs. They were delivered by 9 am the next day. What was the result? The result was the CEO of QSEC, Adele, was very satisfied with the quality of the pens that we delivered and recommended our services for use in the future. So you're keeping it really simple in terms of what you did, how you did it and what was the outcome.

This is an example template of after you've completed a job, here's a short survey and here's the type of questions that you could send, that you could use to create that survey in order to be able to get feedback. Using a simple survey like this every time you do work will enable you to have some data and some evidence so each time you respond to a new opportunity or tender, you can start having a list of references and you could confidently say that 100% of the organisations that we have worked with have said that they are extremely satisfied with the services that we provide. So again, just a very short example of some of the questions that you can ask in order to maintain that feedback register to help build your case for the future.

Back to the three Ps, understand your position, what's the type of work you want to do? Who do you want to work with? Where do you fit into that playing field? What's your story going to be? How are you going to go in? How are you going to pitch? And then what's the evidence? What's the evidence that you can use to show that, I've done the work, I've won the work, and not only have I won it, I can actually deliver against the contracts that I've been engaged to deliver against.

So we've covered quite a bit of content there. Any questions coming through?

Adele Laughton: There's a comment in chat, Thomas and Elizabeth, you might want to talk to, about the bigger businesses often getting more of a benefit. Obviously, there's lots of different sizes of projects, and lots of different sizes of tenders that come to market.

We see heaps at QSEC that are really directed at small businesses and some very specific at social enterprise and social impact businesses. So I think that there is an enormous bucket of procurement, particularly government procurement, that is on offer and is sort of siloed into different areas. It just depends where you're targeting and where you're directing your business.

 But Thomas and Elizabeth, you might be able to answer that. “I understand the perspective you're presenting. The reality is that companies with larger sales or account management teams hold a significant advantage over smaller firms without those resources.”

Thomas Pollock: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Procurement policies have changed remarkably, and government, I love what they've done. And you're absolutely right when you say that teams with bigger sales forces and bigger account managers etc, they certainly have an advantage over your smaller businesses. But the government in particular have measures in place to level that playing field that they never had before and that's designed to help smaller businesses to compete with those larger ones. And I can emphatically tell you, because we do this with every client that comes onboard, there are many ways to arm yourselves to compete with those larger companies.

The low-hanging fruit are the obvious ones that I mentioned before. You're a social enterprise, you're a small business, you may be also regionally based, ticking as many of those boxes as you possibly can is going to give you a 10, 15, 20% advantage before they even read your submission. So that is certainly helpful. Those social enterprise targeted tender, you'll only be competing with other social enterprises there, which eliminates, 99.5% of businesses in Australia. I don't know that stat. I just threw that one out there. 

I can only implore you to reconsider bidding for these contracts because the landscape has changed and COVID has changed a lot of that landscape as well. The amount of opportunities that are going now to quality smaller businesses who have proved capability. A lot of the things that Elisabeth and I and Adele have been talking about today, that can clearly and simply provide evidence, that yes, we can provide that solution, yes we can give you a fair price and yes we can deliver. You absolutely can compete and win and fulfil government and private sector contracts.

Adele Laughton: I'm also happy to jump in here. I sit on the Ministerial Procurement Roundtable in Queensland, so I'm going to take this with a very Queensland lens and because that's the market I sit in, but other state peaks can obviously talk to different states.

There are direct tenders that are just for small businesses. There are tenders that are in the market just for particular regions. There are tenders in the market for First Nation businesses. The Olympics will be the same. They'll be spread across all of these different areas. I do agree with Thomas, I think if the government is trying to address and looking to support all areas of business and there are specified tenders that come through, some of the bigger tenders that come through though, like small to medium businesses, some of those businesses are still pretty big.

Elisabeth and Thomas would know that small to medium business, cover a pretty broad turnover per year, so some of those organisations do pick up pretty big contracts. We know some social enterprises and members of QSEC that do hold multi-million dollar contracts with the government. There are a lot of our members that sit on procurement panels, which is something we'll cover in webinar two because procurement panels are a little bit different. But there are opportunities there, and the panels that a lot of the social enterprises sit on, they're not social enterprise-specific panels.

They might be panels for construction, or they might be panels for digital work, like people who are getting digital media or social media help. So there's lots of different panels that do exist. Those panels normally aren't social enterprise-specific, but social enterprises can apply for them.

Thomas Pollock: I can add one last thing to that as well. Don't forget that those tender portals, when government go out to tender only 15%, give or take, 15% of what they go out to the market for tenders comes out via those portals.

Adele mentioned a big place that they're buying is those panels, and I mentioned before the business as usual. That's not going out anywhere, that's just going to the people, the business who have rung up that particular buyer and gone, hey, this is who we are, this is what we do, can I flick you a brochure?

We had a catering company who, majority of their work, they sent PDFs to different government buyers in each of the departments, and the amount of money and catering they supplied those departments because none of their competition thought to pick up the phone and contact them.

So, those tendering, it is only a small portion of what government actually are going out there to market for. 

Adele Laughton: Yeah, business as usual, your local council, your LGAs, they do a lot of business as usual because their tendering is a lot lower. A lot of that, like to use catering to Thomas's point, those organisations will call QSEC sometimes and say, hey, we're looking for three social enterprises to quote on catering and event. So this is just where the counsellor can literally put it on their credit card and then it goes through that channel. 

So business as usual is a really interesting market and I think people forget about it. I know you talk about it a lot, Thomas, but it is a market people forget. Sometimes business as usual can go up to $15,000, sometimes it can go up to $50,000 depending on the size of the organisation, the size of the council, even corporate social procurement has a business as usual ceiling.

It is definitely a market if you are in the goods and services space or you're in catering or you're in landscaping, where your contracts might be smaller, there is definitely a lot of procurement opportunity there.

To answer one question that came in, in advance around the Olympics. For those that are interested, the timeline for the Olympics around procurement is about a year and a half away from now. So timelines around that are, depending on what you're doing, unless it's construction or we're in that infrastructure/construction phase in Queensland because as most of you know, took a while to settle on a stadium. We're at that part of procurement in Queensland and I think the timelines that I've seen is supply procurement will probably kick in around 2027. We're getting a lot of questions about that now, but that's a little bit further away unless you're doing construction, building and some of those bigger infrastructure projects.

Thomas Pollock: I can also add one thing too. For the social enterprises out there, listening today that maybe don't have too much experience trying to work with government or win contracts, start with your local council. Start small. Most of the councils since COVID have got buy local policies in place. So, for example, if there's anyone here that sits in the city of Moreton Bay region, I love them, they're an awesome council, mainly because of this. Any contract worth less than $50,000 must go to a local small business. 

So if you are a small business in that region, you hear me say small business, I know you're all social enterprise, but to me and to government buyers, you are a small business. You are a social enterprise as well. If I was a social enterprise, sitting in the city of Moreton Bay region, I'm getting in front of the council, I'm saying, this is what we can do, these are the problems we can solve for you and if you work with us, our impact, we provide a lot more impact than the other small businesses that aren't social enterprises.

Most of the good councils, they do have some sort of small business, at least half of them have a good small business policy in place. But they would love to hear from you that you are a small business and you are a social enterprise, that's going to get their attention without a doubt. How do I know? Because they tell us a lot. 

Adele Laughton: There's an Olympic question here. “What typical types of services/goods are up for tender at the Olympics?”

 The Olympics, lots of things. I mean, clothing, food, produce, plants, infrastructure, pretty much anything that goes into building that Olympics will go into an Olympic procurement pool. It's just staggered out from a timeline perspective. If you think of bringing the Olympics together, got to build it first before we can start looking at what they're going to wear, what food you're going to serve, who's going to be catering, assembling seats, putting plastic wrap on stadiums, plastic wrapping cars, what water are we going to have? So there's a million different things that will be available for the Olympics. The guidelines and what they're going to market for, though, are about 18 months down the track before we will have a staggered announcement of what they're chasing and what they're looking for in Queensland, social impact and social enterprise.

There is a really big focus on it, there's a big focus on sustainability. It's supposed to be a sustainable Olympics. I think it started as a net zero. I think we're now at the word sustainable. So it's a sustainable Olympics. And so there is a focus on circularity, circular economy. There's a focus on making it sustainable, doing things with the environment in mind. And there's a big focus on legacy in Queensland. So what creates legacy is how does it impact the community? So if there's a stadium in Toowoomba, how do we make sure there's impact for Toowoomba and there's a lasting legacy for Toowoomba, out of the Olympics?

So as you can imagine it's a very expensive project to bring. So you want to make sure the host cities and the host regions there is also a legacy for small business, there's legacy for infrastructure and there's legacy around employment outcomes I think would be a big one as well. So upskilling and employment.

Elisabeth Lette: There's a question that's come up saying “Does Queensland have a similar framework to Victoria?” I'll answer that one based on my knowledge of both the Queensland and Victorian government landscapes. Queensland does have it, it's called the QPP, the Queensland Procurement Policy. It does have environmental, social and economic objectives in there, including a particularly strong focus on what's called local benefits. But it is a different framework to what is in place in Victoria. And I know that we've got quite a broad national audience here today, so I would say that each state and territory has some form of procurement policy in place that will give some preferencing to social enterprises or local benefits through procurement.

But even if there is a statewide framework in place, what actually happens in any particular procurement or any particular buying activity will depend on the particular tender opportunity and the particular good or service that that person in government is looking to buy.

So, all governments have supporting frameworks but don't rely on overarching supporting frameworks. Look to the specifics of, what is this particular opportunity looking for? And I've got one open on my desk this morning that came across my desk in my role at ArcBlue. It's got two specific questions in there that I'm just going to highlight now as an example of where you can bring your social enterprise status to be an advantage.

So the question is, “Is the supplier a social enterprise, yes or no?” Now for me as an organisation, ArcBlue, I would have to answer that no. Anyone else that's in the room today, hopefully, you can put a big tick and say yes. That's automatically going to give you an advantage in this particular tender opportunity. 

The next question is, “What is the supplier doing to generate social benefits?” Now again, this is specific to this particular tender opportunity, but this is where in the Queensland government context, if you are a social enterprise and you're operating in Queensland, this is the opportunity for you to talk about all of those great things that you're doing in your organisation to deliver social, economic, environmental benefits.

So that's an example from Queensland government. You'd probably see similar scenarios arise in a Victorian government tender or a New South Wales government tender. So each state or territory will have their own frameworks, but really look to hone in on the particular questions or opportunities that the particular buyer or tender opportunity is asking you to respond to.

Adele Laughton: I noticed Thomas has put a link in to the Queensland procurement website for the Olympics so you can sign up to receive their regular emails on social procurement. I've also thrown an email address in there for QSEC, we have a group around the Olympics and we update information, particularly around social procurement.

That's our focus given that we're the peak body for social enterprise, so we're not really playing in that general procurement pool. Either/or though we're happy to help you out with any information. Might hand it over to you Athanasia if you want to jump in now.

Athanasia Price: Absolutely. Thank you everyone. I know I found some really tangible, useful examples in there from all three of you. So thank you for that. Thank you for everyone who joined us today.

Remember, this is part one of a two-part workshop series. Today, Procurement Readiness. Part two is on the science and art of tendering and applying with confidence. 

I will send out my huge thanks to the teams at the Department of Social Services who are supporting the development of these learning communities as part of the Federal Government Social Enterprise Development Initiative and of course, the team at Social Enterprise Australia behind the scenes that make these communities happen.

Thank you.