Ask The Expert

Affectionately known as ‘The Bid Doctor’, I’m the guy to contact when you want to perform well and have fun while accelerating your career and achieving success on your terms.

I hold a doctorate in workplace learning, where I achieved a world first by researching how people learn from experience within the bid profession. It supports my work where, over the past 25 years, I’ve trained, coached, or mentored more than 5,000 people worldwide in bidding and sales. I’ve designed award-winning bid academies and MBA modules, mentored hundreds of graduates, and written more handbooks than I can remember.

I’ve done most jobs in bidding, so I know what it takes to successfully perform each role. I started my bidding career as a proposal writer and document designer, then worked my way up through various bid and proposal management roles before becoming Head of Bids and then Director of Business Winning. These days I work as a freelance Bid Director on multi-billion-pound opportunities and as a professional development consultant, helping organisations to create development programmes for their bid teams.

My proudest achievements have always been linked to environments where people play to their strengths. I did this most successfully at telecoms giant Vodafone, where I was the player-coach responsible for supporting and developing a bid team that grew from four people in the UK to 220 worldwide in just six years. The Bid Academy I created resulted in me winning APMP UK’s People Development Award and becoming Vodafone’s Global Head of Bid & Contract Training. I then achieved similar success at Strategic Proposals where Jon Williams and I designed Europe’s leading portfolio of bid and proposal training courses which have since won APMP’s People Development award a further three times.

I believe that everyone has the potential to be brilliant. We just need the right encouragement, inspiration and guidance which, when combined with high focus, energy and determination, can achieve outstanding results. Hence why I seek to “inspire, inform and entertain…and be the most enthusiastic and nicest person you know.”

I apply the same principles to coaching people as I do to winning deals, often quoting Richard Branson’s famous words: “What does the customer value most? How can we deliver it better than the competition? And if we do this, will we have fun?”