How fit-out contractors get on tender lists

You get on the tender list by being a known name to the three people who write it, long before the job exists: the architect or interior designer, the project management consultant, and whoever controls the building. Being known means a documented record they can defend to their client, a pre-qualification pack that answers everything in one attachment, and contact that happens when you do not need work. A contractor who starts calling when the tender is already out is asking to be the third quote.

Almost nobody wins a corporate fit-out from an advertisement. The sequence is fixed. A company decides to take space. It appoints a designer and often a project management consultant. The consultant proposes four or five contractors to the client's admin or real estate head, who usually accepts the list. Then the bids go out.

By the time the bid document exists, the decision that mattered has been made in a meeting you were not in. That is the whole problem, and it means your marketing is aimed at three or four hundred consultants in your city rather than at thousands of companies.

The pack they will ask for, ready before they ask

A consultant putting your name forward is taking a risk with his own client. Make it effortless for him to defend you. Keep one PDF, kept current, with all of this in it.

• Company registration, GST and the labour and provident fund registrations you hold
• A turnover statement from your chartered accountant for the past three years
• Insurance: contractor's liability and workmen's compensation, with the policy numbers
• Your safety record and who on site is responsible for it
• Key people: project managers and site engineers, with years in interiors specifically
• Which trades you do in house, and which you sub-contract and to whom
• Six completed projects with area, scope, duration and the kind of client
• Two references who have agreed in advance to take the call

That last line is worth more than the rest. A consultant who rings a reference and gets an enthusiastic answer within the day will put you on the next list without being asked.

Document the project while the dust is still on it

Most contractors have built handsome work and can show nothing for it. The site photographs are on a foreman's phone, at an angle, with cable drums in the frame.

Fix it on every project. On the day before handover, after the deep clean and before the client's furniture arrives, spend two hours with a photographer who shoots interiors. Get the reception, the open floor, the cabins, the pantry and one detail shot of the joinery or the ceiling. Then write half a page: area, scope, programme duration, what was difficult, how the difficulty was handled.

Ask for photography permission in the contract rather than after completion. Many corporate occupiers will refuse later and allow it at signing, and some will allow the work to be shown without the tenant being named. Record the consent in writing either way.

Get on the building's list, not only the consultant's

The second list nobody talks about belongs to the property. Grade A buildings keep a roster of contractors approved to work inside them, with the safety inductions, work permits, insurance copies and night-work arrangements already on file. A tenant fitting out a floor is sometimes told to pick from that roster.

Go and meet the facility manager of every large commercial building in your area, with the pack above. It is an unglamorous afternoon and almost no contractor does it. Ask what the building needs from a contractor before work starts, and get yourself onto the file. Rules on permits, labour licensing and site safety differ between buildings, between states and over time, so take the building's own requirements in writing and check your position with your own adviser rather than assuming the last project's arrangement still holds.

Stay in contact without asking for work

This is where contractors fail, because the only time they call a consultant is when the order book is thin, and the consultant can hear it.

Four reasons to make contact. None of them is a request. Send a completed project sheet when you finish something in a sector the consultant works in. Ask a technical question you genuinely have, about a ceiling detail or a glazing system he has specified before. Invite him to walk a site that is at a stage worth seeing, because consultants like seeing how other people build. And tell him when you have added a capability, a new team or a workshop.

Keep the list in a sheet with the firms, the people, what they work on, and the date you last spoke. Thirty consultants contacted with something useful beats three hundred on a mailing list.

What does not work

Cold emails with a company profile attached, which consultants delete because they get four a day. Rate cutting to buy the first job, because the consultant remembers your rate and not your quality, and you will be held to it. A website that shows renders instead of finished photographs, which tells a consultant you have nothing built to show. Sponsoring an industry event with no follow-up afterwards.

Also honest: if your last two projects ran over and the snag list stayed open for weeks, no relationship programme will help you. Consultants talk to each other more than any trade in this country.

For example, a contractor doing 8,000 square feet at a time

Take a Bengaluru contractor with two site teams, an in-house carpentry workshop, and work arriving from two architects he has known for years. The details are illustrative. One of them has gone quiet, and the order book is now thin.

The work is not a campaign. It is a list of forty designers and project managers in the city, a pre-qualification PDF, six projects photographed properly, and one morning a week set aside by a partner for visits and calls. Within a couple of seasons the contractor is on lists he never saw, because his name came up in a meeting. Our page for interior fit-out contractors covers the quoting and delivery side that has to follow.

What to do next

Write down every project you have completed in the past three years and mark which ones you can show with a decent photograph and a client's consent. The gaps are your first job. Then list the consultants who invited you to quote in those years, and the date you last spoke to each. If you would like us to build that list and the pre-qualification pack with you, book the free audit.