Ask The Expert

Rita’s love affair with bids and proposals started by accident while working as a researcher for a UK university. Rita was the evaluator of multimillion pound EU projects and learned her craft writing formal evaluation reports for the European Commission as part of formal EU audits.  For 12 years she successfully bid for public sector funding from local, national, and EU sources consistently over-achieving her targets for winning new business. The highlight from her initial career was leading partnership tenders with businesses in Europe and government agencies like the (former) UK Trade & Investment. This partnership led to winning a number of awards from ‘The 2003 National Languages for Export’ campaign.

After specialising on tenders supplying SME business support, she decided to take her own advice and in 2012 set up her own company, Apostrofly Limited.  Working as a consultant enabled Rita to branch out in many other sectors providing bid management and other services to clients in private, public, and not for profit sectors.

It was during this period that she got accredited to the top APMP level of professional certification. Rita is a Certified Proposal Professional (one of approximately 175 worldwide) and Certified Capture Practitioner. She has presented at the APMP UK conference and also at the Bids and Proposal Conference in the US on several occasions. Rita was delighted also to serve for the APMP UK Board as Certification Director in 2015-16.  She was a finalist in the ‘Individual Impact Award’ in the 2019  APMP Awards. She’s currently  an APMP Rapport Mentor, mentoring fellow APMP members.

Nowadays she is the Global Bid Manager at Altro Limited, a UK manufacturer of floors and walls, a global company that has been featured 11 times in one of “The Sunday Time 100 Best Companies to work for“. As the first bid manager in the company, she started a global bid management function for its Global Transport sector where she leads a Bid Management Group of 50+ colleagues.  Since starting at Altro, Rita increased the profitability of her division by 81%. She gained customer recognition for the quality of the bids and turned a sceptical internal audience into converted adopters of APMP best practices.

Her passion lies in finding solutions to the small and big challenges that bidding brings with it whilst  supporting her Global Transport colleagues to improve the customer experience.

Her magic power would be to eradicate violence against women.