BWS stands as an award-winning Centre of Excellence for Bid Management, assisting SMEs in crafting compelling, high-quality bid and tender submissions.
Their tailored services ensure clients not only grow new business but also retain existing contracts, all managed through a transparent, quality-assured process.
Here Michael Baron delves into the inspiration behind BWS, his admiration for real-world entrepreneurs, and the distinct way BWS operates.
What was the inspiration behind BWS ?
The inspiration behind starting BWS was the need for high-quality – but most importantly – accessible and affordable support for the micro SMEs that need it the most. The UK Procurement legislation around targeted spend with UK SMEs was a great introduction for our clients, but there needed to be more support in bridging the skills gap in terms of successful tendering for these contracts. That’s where BWS comes in. We strive to offer the expertise and guidance to support our clients to win these publicly tendered contracts. We wanted to utilise our skills and experience in levelling the playing field when it comes to micro SMEs bidding against the ‘big boys’ of their particular industries.
Who do you admire?
I enjoy ‘business’ generally and admire all of the usual household entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos etc. But to be honest, the people that I admire the most are the ‘real-world’ entrepreneurs that bootstrap a business whilst maintaining family life, and wake up every day working towards their dream life – those are the people that I look up to the most!
Looking back, is there anything you would have done differently?
Looking back, we should have cemented our go-to-market strategy from the outset and trusted our ‘reason’ for starting. We tried to follow our competitors in the industry and we soon realised everyone wanted to work with the largest businesses with the biggest budgets; that didn’t align with our strategy so we went the opposite way! I also wish we had invested in our strategy much sooner as we’ve seen major growth since developing relationships with our website management and digital outreach partners.
What defines your way of doing business?
To define our way of doing business would be to say that we want to make a difference in our industry by supporting those who need it most, but would perhaps struggle to access our services elsewhere We speak with thousands of businesses every year that simply do not have the expertise, experience or know-how to successfully bid and tender for new contracts. They are best-in-class at what they do in their regions but don’t have the ability to translate this into winning tenders. We prefer to work with some ‘skin-in-the-game’ and work collaboratively with our clients. The words that spring to mind when describing how we run our business; ethical, affordable, accessible, relatable, likeable, collaborative, and successful!
What advice would you give to someone starting out?
Nail your strategy from the off, but quickly come to terms with the fact that you must remain flexible with the market conditions and your customer feedback, as that ultimately dictates your future success. Listen to your prospective audience carefully, and adapt and react where needed. Your go-to-market strategy is probably the most important thing initially; you may have the best product and/or service in the world, but how do you plan on getting your customers to you? Watching the pennies is incredibly important in the early stages, but know when it’s right to pull the trigger and invest in the things that will move the needle of your business.
Read more:
Getting Too Know You: Michael Baron, Commercial Director, BWS