Let’s Talk! Bid ‘Trench Warfare’: Doing Six Weeks’ Work in Two

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When a team member managing a multimillion dollar bid suddenly left the company, we discovered that the bid she assured us was ‘on track’, in fact, hadn’t even left the station…

As the longest standing bid team member, I was training a new recruit, who—unfortunately—had shared with us that she was dealing with very difficult personal circumstances.

Our team was doing our best to be supportive given the circumstances, but we were understaffed and overloaded, so this recruit was given a multi-million dollar bid to lead; the first of its kind across a significant geographic area, and across six of our company’s product portfolios.

Being aware that no one likes a micro-manager (and trying to not add to her stress), I focused on training her on our processes, giving her the tools and context she needed, and then I left her to it.

In our regular one-on-one check-ins, she told me the bid was on track and that she was on top of everything.

I trusted her.

Then, it came to light that she had lied about her personal issues (and a lot of other things as well), and she exited the company quick smart.

The day after her departure, still reeling from the whole experience, I opened the tender folders to see where she was up to.

Apart from what we had created together, every single document was empty.

I reached out to the bid team and got emails and phone calls back saying, ‘what bid?’

I felt sick.

I literally fled the building to a nearby park and hollowed out trenches in the grass while I paced, crying, swearing and muttering to myself, trying to work out what the next step was.

Not submitting a response was not an option. Requesting an extension was not an option.

So, in consultation with my manager and the remaining team members, I switched 100% of my focus to this bid, starting from scratch to do six weeks’ work in only two.

During those two weeks, I remember crying with a colleague the day before submission, bitterly disappointed that the quality of our response was so far from the quality I usually pushed for, but also acknowledging that even having something to submit was an achievement.

I remember laughing deliriously with members of the bid team over take-away Mexican in the office at some ridiculous time of the morning.

I remember hugs and high-fives as one more document was moved from the ‘work in progress’ folder to the ‘finished’ folder.

When I hit ‘submit’ on our response, I once again fled to the park to deal with the intense release of emotion and stress that had built up over the two weeks.

In hindsight, there are two reasons why we succeeded at submitting a bid at all:

• The relationships and knowledge I’d been lucky enough to build in the many years I’d been at the company meant we could go straight to focusing on the highest ROI content.
• The rigorous processes, templates, libraries and checklists we had in place meant that I always knew what the next step was.

Lessons learned:

1. While intense micromanagement is not the best way to lead people, blind trust definitely isn’t it either.
2. We truly fall to the level of our systems, so build them well
3. When you have to ask a dozen people with already full workloads to fill out a ginormous spreadsheet in two weeks because someone in your team didn’t do their job… it helps if they know you, and if they like you.

Ask me now if those two weeks of intense stress was ‘worth’ the millions of dollars in revenue the contract brought for the company… and I’ll say ‘no’.

But ask me if the friendships cemented and memories built while pulling off the impossible with a team of talented people who somehow still found ways to laugh every day and stay positive despite the stress of being in the ‘bid trenches’, and I’ll say ‘yes’.

No other job I know of requires such intense, simultaneous focus on process and minutia as well as the emotional capacity to effectively motivate a team of spend inordinate amounts of time doing things they don’t want to do.

The satisfaction of working with a team to deliver a result to be proud of is what keeps me coming back for more, trenches and all.

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