PREMIER MODULAR

Premier Modular is one of the leading suppliers of design for manufacture and assembly and prefabricated solutions to UK construction. When we met, the business was working to understand why certain 'must win' projects were not converting, while under pressure from private equity ownership to grow turnover. 

The obvious lever in that situation is to submit more bids. On its own that rarely works: bid quantity does not equal bid quality, and pushing more submissions through the same infrastructure spreads a fixed resource thinner across each one. The real constraint was capacity to produce good bids, not appetite to enter them.

Rather than argue the point in the abstract, we tested it. We ran a pilot on a single NHS bid - Deliberately small - And used it to examine how the business actually behaved through a live process: who contributed, when, and how decisions were made. The pilot produced a bid to a different standard, and a set of specific recommendations for how the business could work better on the next one. 

That report led to five further commissions: maturity modelling focused on their public sector framework bidding, and the design and implementation of a materials system the bid team and their contributors could work from directly.

The business came away with the infrastructure to produce multiple bids at pace without quality falling away - Templates, materials and working practices that let a bid team and its specialist contributors move quickly from a strong starting point rather than from a blank page each time. More than twenty staff went through development workshops, so the capability sits with the people who bid rather than with us. 

That is the answer to the growth question the leadership team started with: not more bids competing for the same resource, but a function able to handle more of them properly.