A Bigger Company Is Checking You Out Before the Job
A carpenter near Grodzisk builds fitted kitchens for private customers and makes a steady living at it. In March a company that fits out office buildings rings him: they need a hundred and fifty worktops and the joinery for staff kitchens, delivery by September, payment by transfer after handover. The call lasts eight minutes and ends with „send us a quote, we are reviewing this week”. The quote goes out the next morning. No answer comes that week, or the one after.
It is easy to put that down to price. Except that before anybody opened his PDF, an assistant in that office did what she does with every new supplier: she typed the company name into Google. She found a business listing with four photos, a phone number and a Facebook page whose last post was a year old. In the „verified” column of her spreadsheet she put a question mark, and the quote went to the bottom of the pile. Nobody told the carpenter no. Three other quotes simply checked out in two minutes, and his did not.
There is rarely just one person on the other side
With a private customer, whoever rings you is the one who decides. In a bigger company your name usually passes in front of three people, and each of them is looking for something different. That is why a website that works beautifully on a homeowner planning a bathroom can quietly fail on a contract, even when it looks perfectly smart.
| Who is checking | What they want | What stops them |
|---|---|---|
| Procurement, buyer | Registered name, tax number, address, legal form, trading history | No details they can paste into an invoice or supplier record |
| Site manager, production manager | Whether you have done this scale, to this kind of deadline | Past jobs described in slogans, with no numbers or conditions |
| Executive assistant, back office | A named person who will reply on a working day | One generic form and silence after sending |
None of these people is looking for a nice design. They are looking for a reason to strike you off the list and have less work to do, because they still have six other suppliers to get through. Your website is there to take that reason away from them.
The minimum that gets you past the first filter
In a corporate check the bar is low but hard. It comes down to details somebody has to copy somewhere before anything else can happen:
- the full company name exactly as it appears in the register, with your tax number and legal form;
- the registered address and the area you actually cover, and if you travel nationwide, say so plainly;
- a list of services with scope, not just categories: „fitted joinery for commercial interiors, worktops, fronts, on-site installation” rather than „carpentry services”;
- references, or the companies you have worked for, even without full names if you are bound by confidentiality;
- a route to a human being: first name, surname, direct number and email address, not only a form;
- how quickly you reply to requests for quotation.
Five of those six are fifteen minutes of writing. The sixth needs a decision and nothing else. That is enough for the question mark in somebody else’s spreadsheet to turn into a date and a name.
Commercial jobs get described differently than private ones
A private customer looks at a photo and pictures their own flat. A production manager looks at the same photo and tries to work out whether you will hit his deadline. So he needs the kind of description that small company websites almost never carry: how much of it there was, in what time, and under what conditions.
Instead of „office fit-out in Warsaw”, write that it was a hundred and twenty workstations in four weeks, installation outside tenants’ working hours, coordination with the main contractor and a handover protocol for every floor. Add whether the building was occupied while you worked, whether you brought your own transport and who dealt with packaging waste. This is not showing off. These are answers to the questions that person is going to ask anyway, and if he cannot find them with you, he adds another question mark. How to put sections like this into plain language is something we cover in the post on what to write on a business website.
One job described that concretely carries more weight than a gallery of thirty unlabelled photos. If all you have is work for private customers, show the ones that came closest to commercial scale: a large rental flat, a restaurant, a law office.
The paperwork they will ask about anyway
Working with a bigger company, documents always come up, just at different moments. In a tender, right at the start. In ordinary subcontracting, usually with the first order. List them on your website and you save yourself a whole round of emails:
- public liability insurance with the cover amount stated, because that is the first thing a buyer asks;
- the qualifications and certificates you genuinely hold: electrical, lifting equipment, construction licences, your crew’s health and safety training;
- a willingness to sign a data processing agreement if the job touches personal data;
- a privacy policy under your form, which is the thing an assistant with no lawyer to hand will spot missing today.
You do not need to upload scans. One sentence does it: „we hold public liability cover of PLN 500,000, policy available on request”. For the privacy policy itself and the wording under your form, there is the post on GDPR on a business website.
Why Facebook does not survive this kind of research
A social profile can be active and good looking and still fail a corporate check, and that has little to do with fashions in web design. First, it carries no registration details, so there is nothing for a buyer to copy. Second, plenty of companies block social media on work machines, so your profile simply does not open. Third, the content runs in date order rather than by service, so nobody can establish in a minute whether you do the thing they need.
There is a fourth reason, and it is the most practical of the four. A website address pastes into an email, into a supplier spreadsheet and into the minutes of a meeting. A profile link in that same email reads as something temporary, even when the business has been trading for fifteen years. We go into this properly in the piece on whether Facebook can replace a website.
A „for business” page and a proper request for quotation
If you want to go into commercial work seriously, give those clients a place of their own rather than a line on the home page. One page is enough. On it: the scale you handle, how you work, payment terms, the area you cover, two jobs described in detail and the documents you hold.
Underneath it, put a quotation form that is different from your normal contact form. A company will not write „could I get a price for a kitchen”. A company has scope, quantities, a deadline and drawings. So give them fields for scope and quantity, delivery date, location, company details with a tax number, a contact person and, above all, the option to attach files: a bill of quantities, a drawing, a specification. A request with an attachment gets priced the same day. A request without one turns into three emails and two days of delay.
When none of this matters
There are trades where you can skip this entire chapter. A hairdresser, a beautician, a small restaurant or a private tutor work almost exclusively for private customers, and nobody is going to vet them as a supplier. If you have no intention of taking work from companies, institutions or residents’ associations, a „for business” page is just an empty room on your site, and your time will earn more in reviews and your Google listing.
The same goes if your diary is full from referrals and you do not want to grow. Your website will still be useful, just not for this. What a site is actually for when you work purely on recommendations is something we looked at in the post on word-of-mouth clients.
How this works with Sitario
The Start plan costs PLN 249 as a one-off, with the first year of hosting, and gives you a multi-page site and a contact form that takes attachments, so you build the „for business” page and a quotation form with room for a bill of quantities yourself in the editor, with no extra charge and no message to us. Changes publish in about a minute, which matters while you are quoting: terms and lead times get corrected the day you agree them. Your registered details, tax number and a named contact go into the footer at launch, because that is what you describe in the order form. Enquiries land in your own inbox and are counted in the panel, so after a few weeks you can see whether anyone is reaching that page at all. You order the whole thing through a form, look at the finished site after roughly an hour, and if you do not accept it you get your money back.
The short version
Working with a bigger company, you are not only competing on price. You are competing to be verifiable in two minutes by somebody with seven quotes in front of them and an hour to pull it all together. Registration details in plain sight, past jobs described in numbers rather than adjectives, your documents listed, a contact with a surname attached and a form that accepts a drawing: that is one afternoon of work which then pays off on every request after it. They will read your quote either way. The only question is what order they read it in.