There's a particular type of frustration that comes from having done it all, yet feeling like you still have nothing to show for it. Tara Panjwani and Tushar Dasghose knew the feeling well. They’d read the procurement frameworks, studied the guidance notes, and mapped the opportunity they were going after. They were prepared…
Until they started reading the actual bid requirements.
Specific policies, certifications, insurance records, a library of comparable examples. One by one, they started pulling on each thread. And one by one, the same thing kept happening:
The thread went further than they’d expected. Way further.
"Everyone thinks they know what they’re walking into with something like this,” said Tara. “Then, I started digging more and realised how much infrastructure we still didn't have set up.”
A Calculated Bet
ETOS isn’t a business trying to find its footing. Quite the opposite. For years, the IT asset management company had built a solid commercial operation in India and the UK. They had the kind of expertise and client relationships that tend to speak for themselves.
So when co-founder Tushar Dasghose identified UK public sector contracting as their next strategic move, it wasn't a leap of faith. It was a calculated call. The public sector represented a substantial, long-term pipeline that ETOS had the capability to serve. Tushar had seen enough of the landscape to believe that.
The objective was clear:
Work out what it takes to get the company into the public sector. Get them ready. Then make it happen.
Sounds simple enough. But what neither Tushar nor Tara anticipated was just how different the public sector game really is. ETOS was well-equipped to deliver the work. They could do that in their sleep. But the documentation? The policies? The language? That was a whole different beast.
“It was a complete night and day difference.”
The private sector, broadly speaking, runs on relationships and reputation. If you've delivered strong work and the right people know about it, doors tend to open. But the public sector is built differently. It runs largely on evidence, frameworks, and documented proof. Boxes that either get ticked or don't, regardless of how capable you are at delivering. ETOS had years of experience with the former. What they were missing was the latter.
Learning the Rules of a Different Game
The first thing the two had to do was understand exactly where their gaps were. And as they started mapping it out, the honest answer was… well, they were all over.
It wasn't that ETOS was unprepared by any means. They had a satisfied roster of clients and an internal operation that could compete with anyone. But government procurement doesn't take your word for any of that. It asks you to demonstrate, in a very specific format, using very specific evidence, that you are who you say you are.
That meant gathering certifications that commercial clients had never needed to see. Insurance documentation accessible in one place rather than scattered across inboxes. Formal policies instead of simply existing in someone's head or “somewhere in the cloud.”
"What we really needed was someone who could tell us what good actually looked like in this context. That’s really difficult to do when you’re so stuck on the inside.”
ETOS needed a guide. Someone who had walked this path before and could help them see the public landscape clearly, rather than being in the thick of the fog. After a mutual conversation, Tara found her way to The Grafter.
The Work Behind the Work
By the time Tara and Tushar reached out, the opportunity was already clearly mapped out. They understood the landscape and knew what winning in the public sector could mean for ETOS. What they hadn't fully reckoned with was how much invisible infrastructure a government procurement process assumes you already have.
What followed wasn't a neat plan executed to perfection. It was a slow process of relearning to look at a business through the eyes of someone who’s never heard of you. A procurement panel doesn't know your reputation. It only knows what's in front of it. And if ETOS submitted a bid in those early weeks, what was in front of a panel wasn't enough yet.
Working through the details together over three months, one recurring realisation kept surfacing:
Things that had felt like they were in place weren't quite in place the way they needed to be. Sure, policies existed. But did anyone other than the person who wrote them actually know that? Could the rest of the team find them? Would they know what those policies meant for how they did their work tomorrow morning?
Again and again, the answer was the same. “Not really.”
"We never really had to look at ourselves through a lens like this before. But once you put yourself in those shoes and start looking, you can't stop."
What those three months really came down to was more than just ticking off a checklist. It was about ETOS learning to see itself the way a procurement panel would. Which is a strange, and at times uncomfortable, thing to do when you've spent years operating in a world where your reputation does most of the heavy lifting. The infrastructure had to catch up with the capability. And that takes a lot of patience and, oftentimes, unglamorous work.
Telling a Different Story
The other piece of bid readiness is presenting evidence in a way that lands. Public sector procurement doesn't respond well to general statements of capability. It asks for specifics. Things like comparable projects, similar scope, and demonstrable outcomes. “Here’s what we’ve got” just wasn’t going to cut it. The format of that evidence matters just as much as the content because strong work presented in the wrong way gets discounted regardless of its quality.
ETOS already had the work by this point. What they didn't have was a coherent, translatable library of that experience. So what they needed was case study material… quickly.
But the problem was that some clients and colleagues were unavailable for interviews on such short notice. So The Grafter wrote two case studies on ETOS's behalf, taking real project experience and shaping it into the kind of evidence needed to win a bid. Alongside those, we put together “how-to” guides the team could use to approach a client interview for this very purpose, what to draw out of it, and how to shape a project story so it does the right job.
"Having actual examples to work from changed how we thought about stories and winning bids. It went from being something abstract to something we could just get on with."
The Grafter's storytelling framework, developed through the Grow Raise Exit programme, was shared as a working tool ETOS could use to keep building their evidence base long into the future, even after the engagement ended.
At the same time, we shared our storytelling framework, developed from the Grow Raise Exit programme, with the team as a working tool so they could build a library of bid evidence that would keep growing for many years to come.
Over the course of our engagement, ETOS subscribed to a couple of bid-finding tools and identified four live opportunities to pursue. Bringing each one to our consulting calls, they wanted a sense check. Had they written enough? Too much? Were they framing their experience in a way that actually answered the question being asked?
That calibration from someone with a clearer vantage point is often what makes all the difference when you’re entering a new market.
The Impact
"We came in knowing where we wanted to go. What the last few months gave us was a realistic path for getting there and the confidence that we were actually ready to start walking it."
ETOS now has what it didn't have at the start of the year: a reliable working infrastructure for pursuing public sector work. Policies documented and distributed. Insurance details centralised. Case studies written and a method in place for producing more.
At this point, the certifications are still in progress, and the bid pipeline is still being built. This is a story that's still in motion, which is exactly where a company at this stage of a new market push should expect to be.
What's changed is that Tushar's original bet, that the public sector represented a long-term opportunity worth building towards, now has the infrastructure around it to become a reality. ETOS isn't waiting to be ready. They're competing, learning, growing, and improving each day.
The rest is what they do best… the work.
The Grafter's engagement with ETOS sat outside the Grow Raise Exit programme and was a standalone consultancy piece built around a specific challenge at a specific moment. If something similar is on your radar, whether as part of a broader growth strategy or as a one-off problem that needs solving, reach out to us here, and let’s have a conversation.