Having recently flown in from a trade mission in Dubai and Saudi Arabia, Nyree McKenzie is taking her innovative business to new hives around the world.
Nyree is a Queensland female founder and the Chief Executive Officer of Bidhive – a procurement bidding platform that helps major contractors and suppliers gain centralised visibility of open tender opportunities, their company’s bidding activity, and their contract award data.
Nyree worked as a bid manager for more than 25 years and found managing the public sector bidding process ineffective and time consuming due to siloed systems. To address these issues, Nyree decided to start her own business to make the process more streamlined and to fill a gap in the market. And Bidhive was born!
We caught up with Nyree to find out more about Bidhive and her journey as a Queensland #FemaleFounder.
What inspired you to start your business?
I spent more than 25 years as a bid manager helping companies win public sector contracts, with over half of that time leading my own international bid consultancy. I was struggling to keep up with demand and the systems I was using were cumbersome and putting unnecessary stress and risk on my team and clients. I couldn’t find any fit-for-purpose end-to-end system solutions that had everything I needed, so I decided to create Bidhive as an all-in-one solution.
What milestones have you reached?
I consider our major milestones to be our customers’ success. Bidhive has allowed our customers to manage more public sector bids in less time, and many are now sector leaders with incredible success rates and the business growth that goes with it. Government COVID-19 response and recovery spend has created new opportunities in healthcare, facilities management, workforce management and infrastructure sectors and this aligns to where we are seeing much of our demand coming from.
Another milestone for us has been seeing procurement reform become a reality. Rapid digitisation, open data and the mandate for small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) inclusion and diversity in contract awards has created the perfect market conditions for a startup like Bidhive. For this reason, we have launched Bidhive Lite to make sure smaller companies can effectively access opportunities and manage the procurement bidding process more efficiently and effectively.
What business achievements are you most proud of to date?
I’m really proud that we’re breaking new ground and educating the market about the importance of transparency in procurement, using data to inform bidding decisions and of course automation and the benefits it brings to what has otherwise been a very opaque, paper-heavy and compliance-driven industry.
We were the first platform to be endorsed for meeting best practice standards for bidding and tendering in the United Kingdom (UK) and are one of the first platforms worldwide to bring multiple tender search portals across multiple markets into one place. And we’re planning to add further data sets from other countries and sub-national governments where open data is available.
Have you participated in any Advance Queensland programs, or received any support from Advance Queensland to date?
I’ve participated in mentoring and we have received Ignite Ideas funding, which has helped us accelerate access to new markets and build the platform to a global standard from day one. We now have users from the United States, UK, Australia and New Zealand.
What’s your advice for other female entrepreneurs and businesses starting out on their entrepreneurship journey?
Don’t underestimate how long things take – from development to customer decision making. Whatever you assume, double it!
Conserve your runway. Until you have recurring revenue, expect a spikey cashflow so manage it carefully.
Keep your due diligence current. Whether you’re applying for a grant or fundraising for investment you’ll save yourself hours by having it centralised and accessible.
Know your metrics. You’ll be asked how you measure success and how you are tracking against those metrics a lot.
