Clean It Up
UK General Cleaning Forum => General Cleaning Forum => Topic started by: lisa123 on March 07, 2006, 12:26:56 pm
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I have just had a phone call from a company called buyers guide. www.buyersguide.co.uk
has anyone heard of them?
Apparently loal councils are no longer allowed to hire large national cleaning companies, and have to hire local services to hep the local economy or something like that.
The only way they can do this is through an online directory, ie the one above.
is this all correct?
i'm not really going for government and school tendering at the moment and said i'm not interested. Have they contacted anyone else?
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Yes Lisa
They contacted us a few months ago but I too declined their kind offer.
Cant remember how much it was going to cost and while we WOULD like to get in to our local authority and associated bodies I just wasn't convinced that this would actually generate any business.
Would be interested in hearing from anybody who DID sign up
Mick
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Load of Tosh. We asked our Regional local authority to be placed on their tender list. They sent us a 35 page document to fill out and the criteria was not achievable as the miminum amount of turnover was Cat 3 £6 million. They will not give tenders out to companies that rely on the council for 100% of their turnover. More like 10%, that would mean you would have to have more than £600,000 to to be even considered. What they do is award the tender to a managed company and then you approach the managed company for a slice of the work.
The County council I,m referring to ask for the tender in March and award it in August. They have kindly advised us to give them a call in August, they will let us know who is the managing supplier and then we can approach them for a slice of the pie. VERY VERY Difficult to get your own work unless you have a huge turnover, most of these tenders are awarded to the big multi nationals or consortimums.
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i was right not to trust them then, it looks like they are glorified sales
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Getting onto the Approved List is an absolute pain, as already mentioned above and then you have to put up with the cheating which takes place to ensure the Direct labour force get the cream'
We were almost bankrupted in our first year by the inefficiencies of local authority employees and we currently have 24k outstanding with our local authority.
Even getting on the list is no guarantee of work.........they are not duty bound to give work to companies, just because they're on the list.
It's not uncommon for businesses to be bankrupted by local authorities but very difficult to prove wrongdoing. I'm taking steps shortly, to ensure we can track accounts through the system and get paid on time.
If you don't have substantial funds and provable track record, don't get involved.....
best wishes
rob