About 123 Tenders

123 Tenders started with a conversation in a van. A groundworks contractor I'd known for years was telling me about a council framework he'd seen advertised, work he'd been doing for private clients for over a decade. He'd downloaded the documents, opened the selection questionnaire, read four pages of it and closed the laptop. He wasn't lazy and he wasn't out of his depth on the actual job. He just had a business to run and no idea what a "method statement" was supposed to look like.

I kept meeting the same person in different trades. A human bid writer starts at around £1,500 a submission, and if you're a five-person firm bidding on a £40,000 contract you might win, that maths never quite works. So the work quietly goes to whoever can afford the paperwork, which usually means the biggest firm in the room. Public money, spent with the people best at filling in forms rather than the people best at the job. That didn't seem right to me, and it still doesn't.

So we built the thing I wish he'd had. 123 Tenders pulls live tender notices from Find a Tender, Contracts Finder and Public Contracts Scotland into one searchable feed, so you're not checking three portals every morning. You can filter by sector, region, contract size and deadline, see what's open near you on a map, and run a notice through Match Score, Tender X-Ray and Bid / No-Bid before you commit a week to it. When you decide to go for it, Bid Co-Pilot and the Answer Library help you draft structured responses from your own company details, and you can export the lot to Word and finish it in your own words.

That's grown into something bigger than tender finding. Businesses told us the paperwork doesn't stop once you win the contract, and getting found in the first place is its own fight. So 123 Tenders became the place that handles the tender, the bid, the day to day running of the business, and now, getting seen online too.

It's built for the firms who never had a bid team. Cleaning contractors, care providers, electricians, hauliers, IT support outfits and dozens more. If you can deliver the work but the procurement process is what puts you off, you're who we had in mind.

Picture how that plays out. An electrician in Bristol spots a £60,000 reactive maintenance contract from a housing association, runs a Tender X-Ray, sees it's scored 60% on price and 40% on quality, and decides it's worth two evenings of work because the patch is fifteen minutes from her yard. Or a landscaping firm in Leeds reuses the safeguarding answer they wrote last spring instead of starting a blank page at 9pm. These are illustrations rather than case studies, we're still young, but they're the shape of what the tools are for.

Public procurement shouldn't be a game only the big players can afford to play. Have a look at what's actually open today and see if there's something for you.