In Your Shoes - Dr. Idara Umoh

Dr. Idara Umoh is the Founder and Bid Director of The Sidylle Group, a bid writing and bid management company, supporting businesses in all sectors with writing bid responses for public sector and private sector tender opportunities. She has also supported clients with grant and funding applications.

An award-winning bid professional with over 17 years of experience in Proposals Management, Commercial Operations management and Bid Writing at Director level, Idara has helped several multinational, medium and small businesses win millions of dollars in new business both locally and globally.

She has during her career prepared and won tenders within the UK, Middle East, Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, Russia, China and Kazakhstan. Her experience has expanded to cover several sectors such as the Oil and Gas sector, Construction, Infrastructure, Health and Wellbeing, Social Care, Education, IT and Software, Utilities and FM.

She is a recipient of the Association of Proposals Management Professionals - APMP 40 under 40 award and been named a finalist in the Energy Woman of the Year category at the prestigious Middle East Energy Awards in Dubai - UAE.

Dr. Umoh holds a PhD in Business Communications and a MSc Corporate Communication & Public Affairs, both from The Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, Scotland. She is APMP certified to Practitioner level - CP APMP and Shipley trained in proposals management.

info@thesidyllegroup.com
07701 009673
www.thesidyllegroup.com 

 

Excited to help businesses win new contracts

Mondays are for client updates. We are currently supporting a range of clients with writing bid responses. As they are from very varied sectors, I will be putting on multiple ‘expert’ hats today in order to provide relevant and targeted updates. I am starting the day with sending out bid status e-mails to our clients, letting them know how we are progressing with their tender or bid response. Not all these status e-mails are done via e-mails, especially where critical information needs to be passed on to the Client, so I will be on the phone some clients this morning.

What gives us the utmost pleasure is seeing our clients win new contracts which help improve their profitability. We are especially excited when we help small and medium sized companies grow by winning new contracts or grants in both the public sector and the private sector and after a very busy start to the year, we are delighted to have received good news!

In the past week, we have received several notifications of bid wins and framework contract success following the support we have provided to our clients. Amazing results for the whole team! I will therefore be checking in on these clients today to make sure they have everything in place to effectively manage the execution of these contracts.

We love to write compliant bid responses

With so many things going on at the same time, it is important that I set out a day to focus on helping our clients write their bid responses. Bid writing happens every day, however, juggling multiple bids requires perfect time management to get the responses to the highest quality which we work to. I have some health and social care tender bid opportunities to help with, IT and software, Utilities and an oil and gas funding application. It has been a vey busy time and we are thankful for the opportunity to help other businesses grow by helping them write winning bid responses. I am particularly determined to provide our clients with the best submissions because a lot of our new business comes from client referrals following contract wins. Happy clients = new business opportunities for us at The Sidylle Group.

Getting bid and tender ready

Today I am helping two businesses get ready to bid for work in the public sector. They got in touch as they want to make sure they stand a good chance before they start bidding for contract opportunities. It is important that small and medium businesses also have an opportunity to bid for available contracts and we are determined to help our clients get involved. 

Having already had power strategy calls with our clients, today I will be reviewing the Bid Readiness forms I sent out last week to see where gaps exist. Once this is done, I plan to arrange meetings with each business to further discuss opportunities for improvement, including working on a strategy to target relevant opportunities, know where to find opportunities and advise on creating bid response content.

 

Training! Training! Training!

This morning has been spent prepping to deliver a bid content writing to an in-house bids and proposals team in the afternoon. It will be a virtual session as attendees are not based locally and attendees will be experienced bid professionals. I am also using the opportunity to update my group bid writing course which runs every two weeks. It is important that the course content remains fresh and relevant to attendees.

Strategy mid-morning meeting with an international law firm to discuss how I can help the firm improve their in-house bid content library. Very exciting!

Full afternoon bid writing training session completed with a very interactive group of attendees. Loads of feedback received and they would like me to help review their next bid response.

Deadline and bid review day

With several client tender deadlines today, Friday is usually one of our busiest days. Today, I also have a £55million bid response to review prior to submission. One of the highest value tenders we have worked on so far this year. Although the response has been primarily written by the in-house proposal team, for a thorough review, it is imperative that I read through the full ITT like I would do when writing the response from scratch so I can spot any gaps in the response. The fact that I love to read comes in very handy on days like this. Glad it is the weekend though; it has been an extremely busy but rewarding week.