What makes your business different? The answer may be hiding in plain sight

There’s a question I ask almost every new tender writing client.

“So… tell me the story of your business.”

Usually, we’ve already talked about the tender: what the contract involves, when the response is due, what the evaluation criteria look like and whether the opportunity is genuinely a good fit.

Then I want to know about the business.

And very often, there’s a pause.

“There’s not much to tell, really.”

“We’re just a small family business.”

“We’ve been doing this for years.”

“There’s nothing particularly different about us.”

“We just do what we say we’re going to do.”

Or one of my favourites:

“We’re pretty boring, really.”

They almost never are.

After hundreds of conversations with businesses responding to government and commercial tenders, I’ve learned that one of the biggest challenges isn't finding enough to say.

It's recognising which parts of a business's everyday experience are actually worth saying.

Why good businesses struggle to explain what makes them different

The problem with your own business story is that you’re standing too close to it.

If you’ve spent twenty years building a company, you don't necessarily think about the twenty years.

You think about Monday morning.

The employee who called in sick.

The customer who needs something urgently.

The invoice that hasn’t been paid.

The piece of equipment that needs replacing.

And perhaps the tender sitting in your inbox that you know you should look at but haven’t quite had time to open properly yet.

Somewhere along the way, extraordinary things become normal.

That creates a particular problem when you need to write a tender response.

A tender evaluator only knows what you tell them

Your tender response may be evaluated by somebody who has never worked with you.

They weren’t there when your team solved the impossible problem at 4.45 on a Friday afternoon.

They don't know your Operations Manager has been with you for fourteen years and can practically diagnose a problem from the sound a machine makes.

They don't know that three of your biggest clients originally gave you small jobs and gradually increased your scope because you kept delivering.

They don't know you've retained most of your workforce through an industry-wide skills shortage.

They don't know your Managing Director still answers the phone when something goes wrong.

They know what your tender response tells them.

This is where otherwise capable businesses can lose valuable opportunities.

They assume their experience speaks for itself.

It doesn't.

They assume an evaluator will understand what makes them different.

They may not.

They assume that because something is obvious internally, its value will also be obvious to the person evaluating their tender.

Rarely.

A strong tender response has to make the invisible visible.

“Everyone does that, don’t they?”

I hear this constantly.

A client tells me something interesting about the way their business operates and then immediately dismisses it.

“But everyone does that, don’t they?”

No. They really don't.

Not everyone has employees who have been with them for fifteen years.

Not everyone knows their customers well enough to anticipate what they'll need.

Not everyone has refined an operational process because the old way wasted their client's time.

Not everyone gives supervisors enough authority to solve problems immediately.

Not everyone has customers who automatically ring them first because they know the problem will be sorted.

And not everyone has built a business largely through repeat work and referrals without ever really thinking of referrals as a “business development strategy”.

When you've operated that way for years, however, those things stop looking like differentiators.

They become habits.

Finding your real tender differentiators

One of the reasons I spend so much time talking to clients before and during a tender submission is that the strongest differentiators often aren't sitting neatly inside a capability statement.

They're buried in experience.

A client will casually mention they've worked for the same organisation for eighteen years.

Hang on.

Eighteen years?

Why has that client continued choosing you?

Another will mention there was a problem during mobilisation of a previous contract, but they sorted it out.

What happened?

How quickly did you respond?

What changed?

What did you learn?

Another tells me they've developed their own system to improve a process or give clients greater operational visibility.

Why did you develop it?

What was wrong with the previous process?

What measurable difference has it made?

Suddenly, the conversation we thought was about answering one tender question has uncovered some of the strongest evidence in the submission.

That's why the work I do before writing is so important.

I need to understand not only what the business does, but why the way it does it matters to the customer.

Capability is stronger when it becomes evidence

Consider the difference.

“We provide commercial cleaning services.”

That's a capability.

“We redesigned our shift structure so the same cleaners consistently attend each client site because our customers told us continuity mattered.”

Now we're demonstrating customer responsiveness and workforce management.

“We undertake building maintenance.”

Capability.

“Our supervisors have authority to resolve minor issues on site rather than referring every decision back through management.”

Now we're talking about responsiveness, accountability and service continuity.

“We provide recycling services.”

Capability.

“We developed a process that allows a material previously destined for landfill to be recovered.”

Now we're demonstrating innovation and environmental outcomes.

The facts haven't changed.

The meaning has.

And, importantly, we're no longer relying on empty claims.

A strong tender response doesn't need more adjectives

Tender responses are full of words like:

Innovative.

Experienced.

Reliable.

Customer-focused.

High-quality.

Best-practice.

There's nothing inherently wrong with those words.

The problem is that every tenderer can use them.

If you tell an evaluator you're reliable, you've made a claim.

If you explain that you've retained the same client for eighteen years, maintained 98% on-time service delivery and provide 24/7 escalation through senior management, you're giving them reasons to believe you.

Evidence is more persuasive than adjectives.

Every time.

The conversation before the tender writing

People sometimes assume that engaging a tender writer means sending over the tender documents and waiting for somebody to make everything sound impressive.

That's not how I work.

The writing comes after the questions.

Sometimes lots of questions.

Most of my initial conversations with clients happen by phone, and much of the detailed information exchange that follows happens by email. I've worked with some clients for years without ever meeting them face to face.

What matters is the conversation.

I want to know what happened.

Why it happened.

What you did.

What changed.

What the customer thought.

What the outcome was.

What you learned.

And what you now do differently because of it.

Eventually, I sometimes hear my favourite sentence:

“I’d never really thought about it like that.”

That's when I know we've found something.

Your strongest tender content may already exist

If you're preparing to respond to a government or commercial tender, you may not need to invent a brilliant new differentiator.

It may already be sitting inside your business.

Look for:

• the long-term customer relationship you've stopped thinking of as unusual;

• the employee who started as an apprentice and now leads a team;

• the process you developed because the standard way wasn't good enough;

• the mistake that permanently changed the way you manage risk;

• the project where your team solved a problem nobody had anticipated;

• the client who started with one small job and now entrusts you with an entire contract;

• the improvement your people introduced that saves customers time or money; and

• the everyday thing your team does exceptionally well but nobody has ever thought to document.

That's where strong tender content comes from.

Not from corporate language.

Not from telling an evaluator that you are “committed to delivering innovative, best-practice, customer-focused solutions”.

Please don't get me started on that sentence.

It comes from what actually happened.

So, tell me the story of your business

After hundreds of conversations with business owners and managers, one thing remains remarkably consistent.

Most people underestimate their own story.

They've lived it.

That's precisely why they struggle to see it.

But somewhere in your business story are the reasons customers chose you before.

The reasons your good people stayed.

The reasons clients came back.

The reasons you survived the difficult years.

The reasons you're still here.

And quite possibly, the reasons an evaluator should choose you next.

Sometimes you simply need somebody standing a little further away to see them.

Every Business Has a Story is part of Let’s Start With Your Story, a TenderWise series inspired by the hundreds of conversations I've had with Australian business owners while helping them turn their experience, capability and evidence into stronger tender responses.

Need help telling your story in a tender? TenderWise works with Australian businesses responding to government and commercial tenders, helping uncover the evidence, experience and differentiators that can otherwise be surprisingly easy to overlook.