About Ben

The email comes from a person. This one.

I'm Ben. Husband, father of two teenagers — so whatever you say to me on the phone won't be the rudest thing I hear that day. When Blisters finds a tender you could win, it's me that writes to you, from my own address, with my number on it. Ring it and you get me.

About the photo. A couple of years back I was driving a Subaru Outback. Good car. Then one day the internet decided who drives a Subaru Outback, my feeds filled up with it, and it was made very clear to me that I no longer fitted the brand image. It had to go, quickly. Trouble was I was between gigs at the time, and my wife pointed out, correctly and annoyingly, that blokes with no income don't get new cars. So in my late forties I did the traffic-control ticket and turned up on site in gear so new it squeaked. The crew teased me without mercy, and fair enough. I spent months on the stop bat copping it from Karens in their hybrid SUVs. It cost me some long, cold days and, at times, a fair bit of my pride — but I got the Patrol. More to the point, it gave me the best look I've had at who actually does the work in this country, and how far they sit from the people who write the tenders for it.

Before the hi-vis I spent twenty-odd years in sales, which means twenty-odd years answering tenders — corporate, government, healthcare — because the sales bloke is who it lands on. I still do it now for my own software business. It is the worst job you can do. Serious numbers of late nights and all-nighters, nearly always because some other flog on the team hadn't done their bit properly, and it cost me my hair. So when I say the paperwork is the problem, I've got the head to prove it. The tenders aren't hard because the questions are hard. They're hard because they're long, the answers are buried in forty pages of council-speak, and the closing date doesn't care that you've got a job on.

And we've all done it. Not long ago a highly professional sales and marketing mob sent me a proposal to take over my whole sales function. Page three, killer line: they'd kept the company name from their last proposal — "always top of mind". Ironic, and that was the end of that. It's also the exact mistake Blisters is built to stop — every answer in your draft comes from your own evidence and cites where it came from, so nobody else's name ends up on your bid.

Blisters does the reading and the first draft. It cites the clause every time so you can check it. And when a tender isn't worth your time, it says so. That can be the most useful thing you hear from us.

Blisters isn't a marketplace and it isn't a consultancy. We don't submit for you, we don't take a percentage, and we don't talk to the council. The bid is yours.

Ben FerrierBlisters is a trading name of IWEB Consolidated Pty Ltd