Unlocking the Mysteries of Public Sector Procurement with Dan Cook

00:00 - Dan (Guest)
The public sector operates in different ways and not every contract or not every relationship will necessarily go through a framework. You can be set up as a supplier without being purchased through such frameworks. That can still happen, certainly for lower value things and again for things further away from that sort of proximity to Whitehall point. Different parts of the public will operate differently, but a lot of public sector contracts and services go through frameworks.

00:31 - Mike (Host)
My name's Mike Lander and you're listening to Higgle the B2B sales club podcast, where we bring you actionable insights about sales, RFPs, negotiations and difficult procurement discussions from sales leaders, brand leaders and procurement leaders. Please subscribe to get updates when new episodes are released. Dan, thanks ever so much for joining me on Higgle the B2B sales podcast. Great to have you, and you're a colleague of John Godfrey and that's how I got to know you. That's right.

01:01 - Dan (Guest)
Mike, yeah, absolutely.

01:08 - Mike (Host)
So why don't you just like kind of introduce yourself who are you, what do you do? And then, rather than the something unusual about yourself, what does it now feel like being on the supply side rather than the buy side? And the listener will find out what that means as Dan explains who he is.

01:17 - Dan (Guest)
Yeah, thanks, mike. So, yeah, welcome everyone. I'm Dan Cook. I am the Director of Public Sector for a digital product consultancy called Red Badger, as you say, mike, also where Godfrey works, and several other people you've spoken to in the past, so I guess the person to that question, mike, is. Having recently joined Red Badger, this is my first role outside of the public sector after 17 years of various public sector roles, so it's my first time as a supplier. I've been a buyer for years and I've engaged many, many suppliers and contracts, and now being on this side as a supplier, it feels incredibly different and the bit that I was really dwelling on is through your career in the public sector or lots of senior public sector leaders.

02:03
You go on various training courses about commercial in the public sector or something like that. But lots of senior public sector leaders, you go on various training courses about commercial. So they go, we're going to teach you about commercial and what it's really like. But nothing really that I ever did in terms of any of the training courses and some of them were up to a master's and MBA level ever really got you to really understand what it's like. I guess quite how much effort goes in from the supplier side, quite how much thought goes into managing relationships, preparing proposals, going to market. The time involved in positioning yourself and being kind of market ready is extraordinary the cost of it and the risks and the ups and downs. It's a hugely different environment and one I immediately had huge, huge, much more respect for. One example is you sometimes look at how rfps have been prepared by a buyer?

02:55
yes, and you just think they're either just really sadistic or they haven't worked on the supplier side, because nobody in their right mind construct something quite so unpleasant or tedious as you're going through.

03:10 - Mike (Host)
I'm laughing because you know I'm an ex-procurement director as well, dan, so I've been on the buyer side as well. I tend to agree with you.

03:15 - Dan (Guest)
yes, I just think we'd like lots of things, mike, like having been in different sets of shoes in a situation provides empathy and provides a different approach to the world and I think crossing over from one side to the other gives you a huge, huge learning boost. And it's just been an absolute sort of crash course in commerciality, managing clients, preparing work and, yeah, brilliant experience.

03:42 - Mike (Host)
Brilliant, dan, thank you. I couldn't ask for a more human introduction. To be honest, I think for all of my listeners out there that are on the supply side, that are sellers, you should all celebrate. Just take a moment to jump around the room and raise your arms and shout, because, as Dan says, it's really hard being on the supply side and being a sales leader and corralling all your subject matter experts and looking at RFPs and writing proposals and going through the process and then, when you win, you've got to onboard the client and everything else. It's really tough. So thanks, dan, for celebrating the differences between buyers and suppliers. So let's move on to the questions. First one, dan, is how does public sector services procurement work? Just give us a kind of a potted view of how that works. By the way, just before you do that, what kind of things have you bought in the past? What kind of like size and level have you bought? Just some outlined examples.

04:29 - Dan (Guest)
So, yeah, I'll say my previous role. Before I joined Red Badger, I was CIO at the House of Parliament and worked there for the best part of 15 years in a variety of roles, starting from project management and going through levels of complexity and challenge. In terms of the roles that I undertook, and in there I bought everything from traditional hardware and infrastructure and big chunky-ish capital purchases for new networks or components in data centers and stuff like that, and obviously a lot of it was buying in services, people to support us doing a thing, and obviously, like everybody, we would have bought several managed service contracts, big relationships with Microsoft and those type of things and hundreds of COTS products. So I would have signed off hundreds of those things in my time and been involved in those processes. So, yeah, a fair amount.

05:23
So your question is how does you know? Basically, how does the public sector procure things? How does it buy things, particularly services? Yeah, particularly services. I guess like a really simplistic model. It kind of works the authority department, the body, works at what it wants to buy and in theory, it should spend quite a bit of time working out what it wants to buy and how best to buy it In reality, that part of the process is often squeezed and rushed and people fly out to market quite quickly.

05:52
But let's say how it should work. You should spend some time thinking about what you want, the best routes to buy it through a tender or framework or whatever. You then go through a process of advertising the thing. So, depending on the value of the service or the thing you're buying, there are different rules and regulations depending on the value. For lower value things. You have more flexibility to do things. But certainly in my last role, anything over about 140,000 took you into an area where you had to demonstrate a higher level of adherence with principles, and the principles being transparency, fairness, competition. They're the core kind of building blocks of the whole thing.

06:34 - Mike (Host)
But anyone out there listening should pick up on, and Dan will probably jump to a later question and just come back in a second. If you're trying to get into public sector, then well and you haven't done it before. Well, a good routine might be to go for a £30,000 entry-level project with stakeholders that you know really well, which has got less competition around it. Would that be true?

06:54 - Dan (Guest)
Yeah, absolutely, we can unpack a bit more on my own journey in the first four months of my business development and sales role. But lower value opportunities definitely are easier for buyers to execute with what's termed a direct award and to go for a lower value and also, from their perspective, a lower risk.

07:14
It's like anything when you're buying a service you want to try out the service before you put your eggs in one basket. So it's the way to start basically. So I'll go back to what I one basket. So it's the way to start basically. So I'll go back to what I was saying Work out what you want to buy, advertise the opportunity. Then you have a process whereby, hopefully, a number of suppliers respond to what you want and you then evaluate all of those responses and that part of the process can be very, very straightforward and simple and undemanding, right through to being like 18 months of ruling process. And for the big, big contracts out there that are awarded by big government departments, the big players that are going for these contracts will be spending a quarter, half of a million pounds on the process from their side. So huge potential for sunk cost, huge cost of sale trying to get that through. And then somebody is awarded the contract and you have a short standstill period usually and then you move into it. So that's simply how it works.

08:20 - Mike (Host)
So it's structured, it's rigorous, it's well governed.

08:23 - Dan (Guest)
Yeah, so in theory it's structured, rigorous and well governed. Yeah, so in theory it is structured, rigorous and well governed. What I would say my focus would probably be different to other services organisations because we are very early in our public sector practice that we're building. I am looking after the entire of the public sector and you will find significant variation between the behaviours of public sector bodies, depending on the commercial teams, depending on what I talk to the team about, like most proximity to Whitehall, proximity to the heart of government and ministers, and, in a very rudimentary way, I think the most rigid commercial practices tend to be those closest to Whitehall. Other parts of the public sector, depending on the organisation, can be far less rigorous and inflexible. They will have different thresholds and with the new Procurement Act coming in, the definition of who classes in the public sector and who the Procurement Act applies to it's changed as well. Yeah, generally. Yes, that would be the process, but it will vary between organisation to organisation.

09:31 - Mike (Host)
So a simple thing, dan, just for the audience. Most people will know, but just to remind people who makes the decision ministers or civil servants?

09:38 - Dan (Guest)
Well, I mean. So again, it depends on where in the public sector and it depends, like I would would say, in some situations you will have a minister that has a very clear view on they want to use a particular company because they know they really like them, and you do hear examples of ministers leaning into a commercial process and setting the outcome from the start, and that has huge problems.

10:02 - Mike (Host)
Yeah, as has been in the press recently.

10:04 - Dan (Guest)
Yeah, exactly, so that can go really wrong. But I think it would be naive of us to think that every commercial process is conducted in how it's described.

10:15
it's going to be conducted, so yeah so sometimes ministerial, it would tend to be, certainly in government departments conducted by civil servants, and often for digital and IT, you will probably have a blended group of the IT side of the buyer that you know, be it the CIO, the CTO, the person running the project that's delivering the thing but there will be like some person from the IT team or group of people from that group, usually blended together with some people from a commercial team who will come together to jointly construct the process and the mechanism that they're going to use to judge who to bring in and, depending on the organization, depending on the individuals, the strength of all that, the control of that process will vary between kind of the IT section of it and the commercial teams. In some departments the commercial teams will have a very strong say in things and push quite hard in terms of what they see, and you know it's not one size. It will vary depending on the personalities and the people involved and unfortunately, sometimes that balance or imbalance can lead to outcomes that the IT and digital buyer doesn't really want. So just to unpack that a little bit in a very competitive market like you've got now, you will find some suppliers offering incredibly low rates or, to some extent, gaming the system by adding people at like ludicrously ridiculously low day rates, knowing that that person will never be deployed on the contract. But the waiting of putting someone in on a rate card of a pound a day will really skew the process.

12:02
So you sometimes and you hear it a lot when you go out, as I do speaking to public sector leaders where a commercial process hasn't gotten the right outcome, and you've got to remember companies that are invested in winning public contracts are committing large sums in terms of how they are designing and approaching commercial processes. So that's their whole game is that you have huge bid teams that are designing and approaching commercial processes, so that's the whole game. You have huge bid teams that are analyzing and assessing processes and finding weaknesses in those processes to exploit them, and that's unfortunately how it plays out. Sometimes you get disappointed buyers. You end up with a supplier who they probably know can't do the thing, but they have designed a process that has allowed that to happen. So yeah, anyway, sorry, I've gone off track slightly.

12:50 - Mike (Host)
No, no, no. So a couple of things on that. So at a very high level, ministers set policy, civil servants execute and deliver against that policy, and there is sometimes a blurring of the line in between about how much influence ministers can have on the process. But broadly, ministers set policy and then civil servants' job is to go in, find the right suppliers and execute against that policy. And the other thing I was going to mention was that I've seen in a lot of processes is as a supplier in the public sector is when they do the scoring. Scoring is very rigorous, very well laid out in terms of what the weightings are and what the criteria are. Often the commercial is separated from the job to be done. So the job to be done, team reviews and the commercial team reviews, and then they only come together at the back end stage. So it's there's some kind of governance between price and ability to deliver, so it's not only on price Exactly a separate governance and, I think, important scrutiny and rigor.

13:45 - Dan (Guest)
You know, because often you'll find that the kind of the IT team or the project team delivering the thing may know a supplier and have a preference, and I think the commercial team are there to apply appropriate rigor to say, okay, sure, Dan, you might like this company, but I want you to demonstrate genuinely that they're the right people for this. I want you to genuinely demonstrate openness to others, competition all of that good stuff and fairness, transparency in the process.

14:13 - Mike (Host)
Exactly Because ultimately there's a right because it's public money of objection, which is like I don't think that's been a fair process. As a supplier, you have to prove it has. Now, my experience is those only ever go one way but civil servants are very conscious of that is that you have to be able to defend your choice based upon all of the criteria that have been laid out. So what about if you're a supplier looking to get into public sector? What's an effective entry strategy for a services supplier to get into public sector work? So I mean badges is a good example, relatively small footprint in public sector currently compared to the rest of the work that you do. What's the kind of? You don't need to describe your entry strategy, but what would be a good entry strategy for a services supplier looking to meaningfully get into public sector work?

14:56 - Dan (Guest)
yeah, I'll try and unpack this in a sensible way because it's quite a bit describing my life, which has been working for the last four months and alongside colleagues in red badger on an evolving strategy around how to do it. But let me pick out certainly what some things to think about. So you need to have a think about how people can buy you Basically. How do I buy this service from this person? So sorry for anyone teaching suck eggs here, but there will be frameworks through which people can purchase your services. You know like G Cloud and DOS are probably two of the more famous ones, but there are hundreds of these things and it seems like there's a new one created all the time.

15:33
So understanding how you can be purchased is obviously a really key, key early step and working out which frameworks you're going to go for and, depending on the different frameworks, have different entry requirements. You know for some they're incredibly rigorous. You have to demonstrate that you have the scale and the recent and relevant experience to qualify to get onto a certain framework. So for some it will be. Give us three examples of projects that are over £20 million in value that you've lived in the last three years in this type of sector, so they can be very, very specific and weighted towards people that have done it before. Others have a far lower bar for entry and are far more acceptable for SMEs, so you need to understand how people are actually going to purchase your services. We'll be talking about that now.

16:23 - Mike (Host)
On that point, dan, just the ability to raise a purchase order. Understand how are they going to raise a purchase order in order to get you paid when you invoice? Simple, simple stuff, simple stuff exactly Now.

16:35 - Dan (Guest)
Again, and I'll make this point throughout the public sector operates in different ways and not every contract, or not every relationship, will necessarily go through a framework. You can be set up as a supplier without being purchased through such frameworks. That can still happen, certainly for lower value things and again for things further away from that sort of proximity to Whitehall point. Different parts of the public will operate differently, but a lot of public sector contracts and services go through frameworks, so got to suss that bit out first and foremost.

17:08 - Mike (Host)
And frameworks, dan. My recollection was they often come up once every three or five years, though. So once a framework's been awarded, it's quite a's quite a while potentially, before it opens up again. Is that true, or is that not true?

17:19 - Dan (Guest)
yeah, so that's definitely what was one of the things the new procurement act has introduced and I'll get the language wrong, but it's basically a mechanism to allow a new entrance to come in to the framework more regularly than before. There's a phrase for it which I'll dig out at some point, but but yeah, essentially they've tried to make it easier to get in at more regular entry points.

17:40
So I guess the other bit in terms of strategy is and obviously Red Badger will have thought about this when they were just working out who might lead a public sector practice is thinking about who's going to lead that strategy and enact that strategy. So clearly, if you've got someone that's worked in the public sector for many years and comes with them and brings with them an established network, that's going to be could be a very important part of the strategy Exactly.

18:07 - Mike (Host)
And that again, dan, that's not because of you've got preferential treatment in fact the opposite but it means you've got a relationship you can have a conversation.

18:14 - Dan (Guest)
You've got a relationship you understand well, I'd say broadly you will have a better understanding of the challenges faced by the people that are still working in the public sector doing that role Exactly. You'll be able to speak the language, you'll understand the commercial processes and you'll be able to navigate it far better than somebody that doesn't bring that sector experience, it far better than somebody that doesn't bring that sector experience. In this first four months I've spoken to many of our peers or competitors or whatever you want to call them other people operating offering similar services to us, and you've seen a number of them succeed where they have very intentionally dipped into the public sector to try and bring on board people with experience and credibility and network from the public sector and understanding of it. So I think that's something I'd seriously consider if I was recommending somebody to think about the value you're going to get from that. I guess other things to really have a think about is when you start a role like this and you go out talking to other people who are doing similar things, the phrase that comes up again and again and again is ecosystem and partnerships. Lots of people that try to get into the public sector will quite quickly get to a realization that one of the quickest routes to market and to start to bring in revenue is through partnering with a bigger supplier.

19:34
So the public sector, in particular central government big departments, spend vast sums delivering huge digital projects, huge, huge things, hundreds of million pounds projects all the time. And given the scale of those things, the scale of the size of those requirements to deliver, those contracts tend to go to, let's say, like 10 or so of the large operators, the larger sides, because actually they're the only ones really that have got the scale to be able to demonstrate that they can deliver on a 500 million pound contract which requires thousands of stuff. But when those contracts are awarded, several things could be at play. So either the contract could stipulate that X percent of the value of the contract has to go to SMEs, which is increasingly common you may find the big SI doesn't necessarily have the capability or the capacity to deliver on part of the contract, so they will look to bring others in. So loads of people when you speak to other organizations, have a relationship with either other SMEs, whatever it is.

20:38
Architects, you know, name the digital role, but they would ask you to sort of drop in a couple of specific roles to a contract and you know that is something you have to consider whether you're willing to work in that way, whether you're happy to not own the entire outcome, as it were, and you're just putting some people into a team. You obviously have to be thinking about how much margin the SI is going to take, how much you're really going to make off the individuals you put in. But if you come in cold to the public sector, most procurement processes are going to ask you to demonstrate with case studies your experience of delivering services into the public sector. It's hard to start. So I think for lots of people, starting via someone who's already got an established contract is a really obvious way to go in.

21:39 - Mike (Host)
Yeah, exactly, and maybe one of the conditions of being a partner of an SI who's leading this is the ability to write a case study that's co-branded.

21:47 - Dan (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's something you're looking for in sort of building those creds. And the other part of the strategy certainly that people should be thinking about is who can they work with in year one it gives them some good credibility who will allow them to do a case study? They should certainly be willing to consider working at a reduced rate, possibly even working at a loss, in order to achieve sector credibility and case studies, Because really, without those, you're not going to be able to scale. You're not going to be able to scale, You're not going to be able to convince people. So I think, having a very realistic view on the first couple of years in terms of how to build it, I think there's something they'll certainly be thinking about in terms of getting in.

22:26 - Mike (Host)
I think the other thing to add to that, Dan, would be around the rate card expectations. A lot of public sector work still is bought on rate card. We all know why that's not ideal and we all know that we should be buying outcomes and outputs rather than activities, but it still happens a lot. Public sector still buys a lot of rate card based work and, of course, because the public sector is so big and it buys so much, it has obviously very competitive rate cards. And so I think again, if you're entering into a strategy of public sector, is one of your lines of business recognizing that your rate card with investment banking will be very different to your rate card with public sector? Is that also broadly true? That's?

23:04 - Dan (Guest)
definitely, definitely true and kind of previous caveat still applies in terms of there being variability. But yeah, generally speaking, day rates are going to be lower. When you're looking at opportunity RFPs, they will always spell out the criteria in which the decision is going to be made and, depending on the organization, they will have different ratios around the cost of the survey versus the quality right and depending on that, you'll get a flavor and you'll work out quite quickly actually what your chances are of winning a piece of work based upon those ratios and certainly, like the bigger organizations that are doing this every day of the week with huge bid teams, we'll look at some of those and go do you know what rate? You know what our supplier, our competitors rate cards are going to be looking at that percentage and how big the contract is going to be. We know we're not going to win that, but for someone new to public, it's worth doing a couple of processes because you will get feedback. You'll get data on how you've performed.

24:03
In the first six weeks with the Badgers I had a proposal for a small value piece of work and at the end they'll give you feedback on what you scored in terms of price.

24:13
You know, price was 30% of the criteria. We put in a price, I ended up we ended up scoring like 8 out of 30, which means the person that got someone actually got 30 out of 30, which would have been the lowest price, the lowest price. So you can do the maths and work out basically what the lowest bid was. They also told us that the winning bid scored 9 out of 30. So very close to us. So in terms of price, we went in a good place and we could see actually that we lost on the quality. I mean definitely in terms of like building that strategy for public sector. You can demand feedback on any commercial process and it is public, you know it is public, it is out there. You can ask for feedback, you can ask for a chat, you can say what did we score on this specific question? So you can build your experience and your ability through feedback and that's another important part.

25:05 - Mike (Host)
And I think, Dan, also what you mentioned. There is the perception that it's only about price, and it's just not true. The weightings are very clear. The weightings are absolutely laid out in public sector tenders and it's normally between 20% and 40%, isn't it, on the commercials. So you have to do both A brilliant score on the content thing you're going to deliver and also a good score on the commercials. But that doesn't mean you have to be the lowest-priced producer to win. No, absolutely not.

25:30 - Dan (Guest)
Absolutely not, and I think smart buyers, smart commercial teams, will design a process to avoid their hands being tied by somebody putting in a ridiculously low bid. Because actually, when you go out, mike, in the morning to get a cup of coffee, you don't go to the place that sells the cheapest coffee, do you Ever Right Ever? It doesn't apply fully that example, but I want a decent cup of coffee and I'm willing to pay a little bit more for the quality. So smart buyers, smart commercial teams, will design things that mean they don't get the wrong one you don't get very good people inside public sector.

26:17 - Mike (Host)
They're there for the ride. Absolutely not true. My experience of public sector people that are committed public servants the pay is pretty good. It's not amazing, but it's pretty good. But these are incredibly bright people. These people know what they're doing.

26:26 - Dan (Guest)
Yeah, you get hugely talented and capable people, often clearly driven by social value and public value and wanting to do the right things. So I think, brilliant capability in the public sector. I think all I would add to that point is the difference between public and private is the public sector will tolerate poor performance in a way that the private has far less appetite to do so. Both sectors have amazing people in them. The public has more percentage of people that are either wrong attitude, not putting it in lower performers, because, having been in the public sector, it's harder to tackle those type of things and, as a result, often people will ignore that. But anyway, that's a whole different podcast.

27:11 - Mike (Host)
And that's also because it's a massive employer. It employs hundreds of thousands of people, so you're bound to get more variability. So just pulling it together now, because I'm conscious it's 30 minutes in. So in conclusion, if you just had to like, pick your top three takeaways, you know, for a mid-size SME looking at working with public sector, what are your top three pieces of advice, given that you've been 17 years on the buy side? You're new to the sell side, but it's opened up some interesting different perceptions. What are your top three takeaways for mid-size SMEs looking to get into public sector work?

27:43 - Dan (Guest)
Okay, right, a few of these. So think about the strategy is going to be everything right and we've unpacked a lot of this. But work out in your head whether you are going for a network-led sales strategy predominantly, whether you're going for a partnership sales strategy, whether you're going for a kind of we're just going to bid for loads of opportunities strategy, or what percentage of those three blended you're going for, and be quite clear at the start that actually we're perhaps not going to go after that many open tender opportunities because of, well, any of the following reasons A, we don't have any credibility, so we know we're not going to win things, probably being the biggest one. B, we don't have the internal capacity or capability to construct large proposals. And, c, we don't really understand the sector very well. So I think, like, be quite clear and as we've gone we've evolved our view on that. But be clear, and obviously it's fine to evolve that strategy as you go. But like, is it network driven, partnership driven or open tender driven? And what combination of those things are you know? Are you going to balance and play on? I think, like a very kind of early activity to do is to look at your, your kind of hygiene, your hygiene factors in your route to market factors, and I sort of bucket those things together as things you have to do and have in place to be able to be bought, to be able to buy you. So we already talked a fair bit about like being on frameworks. So you need to be like, clear on frameworks how people are going to buy you. You also need to be clear on what certifications do you need in place to enable people to buy you and to be on certain frameworks, and by that I mean, like you know, iso 27001, you know cyber essentials and, depending on the frameworks you're going for and how large they are and the type of things, there's certain things you need to have in place to win a large number of contracts. So I definitely, yeah, think about this. So, number one, think about your strategy and how you think you're going to win contracts. Number two, have a big look at your hygiene stuff. And then the third one is probably a real lesson that I think has been brilliant.

29:57
In the first four months we've done at the Badgers. We've spent a huge amount of time out speaking to other organisations and you know competitors, peers We've just been out speaking to hundreds of people in this period Just to start out what's happening. People are very generous, actually, even if they're competitors, and some people won't give you time of day because they'll look and be like, okay, well, we won't talk to them. But most people are pretty decent, mike, and they will go for a coffee. They'll tell you what they're seeing, they'll give you a couple of anecdotes, they'll explain what happened on a recent procurement exercise they underwent and what happened to them. Obviously, that's easier if you're already established.

30:39
What we found is, through our team at Red Badger, we knew a lot of other suppliers and a lot of other people operating and we were able to have conversations which built this evolving intelligence that we have around. What's happening in the market? How are people buying? What are the rough day rates? How are people winning things? Which suppliers have got a good reputation for partnership, which don't? Which buyers actually do you want to work with? Which buyers are less attractive? And you can learn a huge amount just by going out, having some coffees, having some calls with people and people will share stuff. So we learned a huge amount from network, just saying actually, the way the market is at the moment. We just lost this thing on price and the winning day rate was like 400 quid a day. So those things will tell you quite a lot. Will tell you a lot about what's happening and your own likelihood in succeeding. So, yeah, those are probably the three.

31:38 - Mike (Host)
And so what kind of like occurs to me is in terms of three kind of phrases be intentional with an investment, have a strategy and take your time and build a network.

31:47 - Dan (Guest)
Yeah, I mean, yeah, I think they're all great and I think just it's fine for the strategy to be an evolving piece of work, like it evolved every day. And I remember, certainly in the first couple of months, I'd check in with dave, our ceo, a lot on air, and we would both be having conversations and our view on something would change quite a lot from one day to the next. Or we'd get some new intelligence in and we'd go and you'd triangulate the evidence of the last week and you'd go do you know what? I don't think we should do this anymore. Let's do this exactly be adaptable, be adapt, adaptable.

32:19
But to use kind of a popular phrase at the moment in public anyway, like, test and learn, do a thing and see what happens. You spend most time thinking about what you might bid for. But do a bid, see if you win. If you don't win, learn from it. Then next, do an event, see what happens. But do stuff and see what happens and then evolve as you go and iterate the model. And we're still in the mid-flow of doing that and I think it will continue to evolve as the market changes and, subject to the economy and whatever is happening over the pond. All that stuff is going to influence a bigger model of which we're part of Exactly.

32:57 - Mike (Host)
Dan, it's been amazing. Thanks ever so much for joining me on Higgle, the B2B Sales Club podcast. It's been a really, really interesting insight into public sector procurement and as a supplier into the public sector. Where can people find out more about you? Well, thanks for having me on.

33:09 - Dan (Guest)
Mike, real pleasure to speak to you and really nice to be able to reflect on this early phase in. I'm a fan cook, or you can get in touch with me via the Red Badger website as well. All the details are on there. So, yeah, I'd love to chat to anybody who's on a similar journey or who wants to learn what we've been through or wants to share lessons on it. Really, because it's yeah, I would like to be as generous with others and people as have been with me in terms of sharing learning and lessons and that sort of thing.

33:38 - Mike (Host)
And what a great way to end the podcast, dan. Thanks ever so much for joining me. Thanks, mike. Thanks for listening to Higgle the B2B Sales Club podcast series with your host, mike Lander. Please subscribe so that you'll catch all the next episodes.