Growth at Any Cost. How Losing Can Feel Like Winning.

There's a particular kind of trouble that doesn't look like trouble at all. The pipeline is full, the team is busy, and the win rate on competitive bids looks respectable. Everyone is working hard and the business keeps landing projects. It feels like momentum.

But if nobody has defined what a good win looks like, the business can spend years getting better and better at winning work it never should have pursued.

The first problem was posture. RFPs weren't being sought out, they were being reacted to, usually two or three days before bids were due. Every proposal was a fire drill. There was no time to understand what the project would actually require, no certainty the right people would be available to staff it, and no room to ask the clarifying questions that sharpen a bid. The team wasn't bidding, it was scrambling.

The second problem was the mandate, or rather the absence of one. The people running the bids were operators. Good at delivering work, but with no experience negotiating against the sophisticated counterparties issuing the RFPs, and nobody had ever told them what the company was actually trying to achieve. No margin targets