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Are there many painting contracts available right now? You might have found yourself asking this question recently.
It can feel like a rocky time for businesses across the board. But tradespeople and construction companies are continuing to work throughout the second national lockdown. This includes the 112,800 painters and decorators employed across the UK, whether they’re sole traders, business owners, or self-employed sub-contractors. What does this mean for painting contracts?
Further Government guidance has been added recently on the closure of non-essential businesses. This doesn’t affect construction sites or painting and decorating merchants without showrooms. It does, however, involve public showrooms for products used in painting and glazing. It also affects painting and decorating sub-contractors who work in people’s homes.
The key points include:
While the guidance sets stricter boundaries, it still actively encourages painting and decorating sub-contractors to operate their businesses. And there’s great value in continuing to operate and source painting contracts right now. Alok Sharma, the Business Secretary, recently thanked the constructor sector directly for staying open. He stated: You are making an invaluable contribution in supporting the economy.
This sentiment is all well and good if painting and decorating sub-contractors are able to find suitable painting contracts. And we’re here to tell you – there are painting contracts available! You just need to be smart with how you go about finding and securing opportunities when you can.
If you’re currently relying on word of mouth or local advertising, a tendering portal will open up more business opportunities. If you’ve tendered before, are you certain you’re tendering in the most effective way possible? You could, in fact, be wasting a lot of time and energy and still be missing out on opportunities. We’ll break down the best (and worst) tendering methods to assure you’re taking the correct steps towards finding painting contracts.
Tendering not only opens the door to a greater number of painting contracts, but it also brings more lucrative leads. For instance, SMEs and sole-traders can bid for work on large painting contracts as part of a framework agreement. Within a large contract, your work may cover a number of different areas and services.
For example, a large framework may entail painting work across a range of communal housing facilities across the UK. The contracting authority would set out the specifications of the framework and assign different ‘lots’ for different service providers. Each lot could refer to a different area of the UK, for example:
You can tender for one or multiple lots, depending on where you are based and how far you’re willing to travel. The painting work required within this framework might also cover a broader range of services than smaller contracts, for example:
This kind of work gives you valuable experience and reliability through working with other service providers. Frameworks are therefore a great stepping stone to larger, sole supplier painting contracts to grow your business in the future.
Whether you are brand new to tendering for construction contracts or looking for tips to improve, we can help. Finding leads and tenders doesn’t need to be difficult. Certain methods of finding painting contracts for your business, however, can be a big waste of time and resources.
The following advice will demystify the process, and ensure you put your best foot forward on your tendering journey!
Firstly, are you aware of Common Procurement Vocabulary (CPV) codes? Bear with us with this, we promise this is not as dry as it sounds. (Okay, maybe it is, but it’s important, so we’ll make it quick!)
All tenders in the UK are tagged via CPV codes. These are essentially 8-digit signifiers, followed by a classification number. CPV codes are used to classify the tender and make it searchable. If you’ve tendered before, you will have seen them on every tender. Any painting contracts available for tender should, in theory, be tagged with one of the following codes for painting work:
However, painting work may also fall under several other umbrellas within the CPV code library. For instance, these CPV codes all fall under construction work:
And the following codes fall under roofing work:
You get the point, there’s a lot of codes to work with for painting opportunities…
In theory, if you search using these CPV codes, you’ll find all the up-to-date painting contracts available in an instant. Right? If that sounds too easy, that’s because it is…
Even if you’re searching via all of those painting related CPV codes, you’re missing countless painting contracts. Around 30% of tenders are tagged with inaccurate CPV codes.
For example, this week one of our Opportunity Trackers, for Construction Tenders, came across a large tender for Refurbishment Works. This contains potential opportunities for painting contracts, among other renovation services. However, this refurbishment tender had been mistakenly tagged with the CPV code for Installation (computers).
Obviously, this is completely unrelated – so no one searching for refurbishment contracts will see this opportunity! Countless tenders are being missed, every day, because of this flawed system. It’s not uncommon for painting contracts to slip through the cracks, despite the vast amount of painting related CPV codes.
Clearly, a procurement manager can tag a painting tender with a computer-related code before their morning coffee. Easy mistake – in fact, there is a pesky CPV code for ‘Painting software development services’ (72212327-7). But unless you’re considering a drastic career change, that’s no good for a painter and decorator…
You might be asking, what’s manual tracking? As I said before, one of our Opportunity Trackers spotted the CPV code mix-up. That’s because they’re real people, skilled at sourcing relevant tenders for our clients and correcting inaccurate tags.
After finding the Refurbishment Tender, for example, our Opportunity Tracker posted it onto our portal, Construction Tenders. This tender is now categorised using industry-driven keywords and is easily searchable for interested suppliers. Our opportunity tracking team do this for 1000s of Construction leads on a daily basis. Easily filtering by keyword, location, budget, etc saves time and money when finding painting contracts available near you.
Construction Tenders makes finding painting contracts far more efficient than portals which rely on CPV directories. We also host construction opportunities that are exclusive to our portal. Book a free live demo to see the live opportunities.
Make sure you have all qualifications and certifications in line with construction working guidelines. All painting contracts and decorating works in the UK are measured in accordance with certain rules, such as:
It’s important that painting and decorating sub-contractors are able to measure painting and wallpapering works in accordance with SMM7 or NRM2. This can be via drawings either provided as ‘hard copy’ or electronic formats.
Some projects may be priced from a bill of quantities (BoQ) provided by the contracting authority of a tender. The painting and decorating sub-contractor must insert their own unit rates in order to calculate the overall tender price. Sub-contractors must, therefore, be prepared to calculate their unit rates for all types of painting and decorating works.
Once you know your rates and have your certifications and qualifications ready to go, you’re ready to tender. At this stage of the process, we can support you every step of the way. Our blog directory offers plenty of helpful information about tendering in construction.
For further support, our Hudson Succeed team offer expert bid writing assistance. From writing support to help maximise your bidding success, to fully outsourced bid writing to save you valuable time. Our bid writers have extensive experience delivering construction tenders – with an 87% success rate.
We also offer free Tender VLE masterclasses, teaching you useful tender tips, such as how to break down a tender.
Whether you are tendering for the first time or have tendered before, we have four services tailored to your needs:
Get in touch to learn how you can succeed with us.
Book a free live demo of Construction Tenders today and receive a daily construction leads bulletin straight to your inbox. The bulletin contains all the relevant construction tenders that we have uploaded that day.
This includes the following sub-sectors: