Handoff ownership
The engineer who confirms the design and the manager who submits the bid work to different clocks, and nobody owns the days between them.
Energy & Utilities
Tenders and service contracts pull one team two ways.
The B2B sales cycle in energy and utilities runs for years, through permitting, procurement and a committee split between the engineer and the buyer. Nobody designed the sales process for that shape.
Sector read
The grid slipped. So did your proposal.
In a company like this, a grid connection date slips by a quarter and the whole deal is written off as regulatory delay. Inside that quarter the proposal sat eleven days with the engineer who had to confirm the design, four with procurement, and a week in a committee the CRM has no field for. The regulator caused none of those twenty-two days.
One team sells a five-year O&M contract and an installation won by tender through one pipeline and one forecast, to a committee that splits between the engineer who judges and the buyer who signs. Renewals are processed after the fact rather than sold. The grid sets part of the timeline. The rest is yours, and nobody has split the two.
Where the delay is yours
Outside timing explains part of the delay. Not all of it.
Permitting and procurement are real. So is a proposal unread for eleven days, and the two sit in one line of the forecast until someone separates them.
- 01 · Surface · what gets reported
Long deals blamed on regulation
Long timelines get put down to permitting and procurement by default.
- 02 · Structure · what produces it
Project and service share one pipeline
Project work and ongoing service run through the same pipeline and the same forecast.
- 03 · System · where it breaks
Nobody owns the engineer-to-sales handoff
The engineer who judges the fit and the person who signs are different people with different rules.
- 04 · Consequence · what it costs
Margin hidden in the mix
Which part of the business makes the margin stops being visible.
The cause and the cost rarely show up in the same place.
What the Diagnosis reads here
Permitting dates against proposal dates, deal by deal.
Permitting and grid timelines, read beside each proposal's own dates and the people who moved it. Whatever the rules dictated is set aside; the days left over are the ones your handoffs added.
- Business development
- Engineering and delivery
- Regulatory and channel owners
- Permitting and grid timelines
- Procurement cycles
- Handoffs between engineers and sales
Tender revenue and service revenue arrive on different clocks here; what the blended margin hides is the question the finance page takes up.
What tends to break first
The engineer-to-sales seam goes first.
A cycle measured in years gives every delay somewhere to hide. Where the engineer who judges and the person who bids sit in different teams, that seam leaks first.
Tenders and service, one process
A tender is won once; a service contract is kept every year. One process run over both spends tender effort on renewals and renewal effort on tenders.
Margin visibility
The blended margin looks stable while the two parts pull apart under it. Which of them pays for the other is not a question the board pack can answer.
Who gets blamed for the delay
Permitting takes the blame, which is often fair and impossible to argue with. The days that belong to your own team are filed under it and never counted.
The evidence
Measured outside your walls; not measured inside them.
How long the grid, the permit, the tender and the renewal take, from the bodies that count them. None of them measures the days a proposal sits with your own engineer; that number is in your deal files.
- 01
Nearly 5 years
The time a typical US power project built in 2023 took from interconnection request to commercial operation, against 3 years in 2015 and under 2 in 2008, while only 20% of the requests made from 2000 to 2018 had been built by the end of 2023.
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Queued Up: 2024 Edition, Rand et al., 18,132 requests 2000 to 2018, April 2024, high-level findings and slide 26
- 02
6 years
The average permitting time for onshore wind in the EU in 2022, against a target of 2 under the new rules: the outside clock a bid team can point to, and the one that hides its own.
Ember, European Electricity Review 2025, citing its Europe's race for wind and solar, 23 January 2025
- 03
33%
The share of British businesses that switched energy supplier in the previous twelve months, up from 26% in 2023: the contract you count on renewing is on that market.
Ofgem, Non-domestic consumer survey 2024, IFF Research, telephone survey of 1,000 businesses in Great Britain, July to September 2024, published 13 March 2025
- 04
74 days, and 28%
The average time from offer deadline to contract award in public tenders, and the share of awards with a single bidder, for a typical EU country in 2024; the figure covers public purchasing of every kind, since no utility-only measure could be verified, and it is the clock a public tender here runs on.
European Commission, Single Market and Competitiveness Scoreboard, public procurement, EU average as shown on the country pages, reporting period January to December 2024
What happens next
The Diagnosis first; the other two sit before and after it.
Diagnosis
€15,000 flat · two months from the day we get access
Business development, engineering and regulatory owners interviewed; permitting and procurement dates read beside each proposal's own. What you hold at the end: the cost of the days your handoffs added, at the day rates you pay, and which handoff to fix first.
Book a strategy callDetails →Operation
€50,000 more within 30 days of the Diagnosis briefing · €65,000 with it included
Nine months putting an owner on the engineer-to-sales handoff and splitting tenders from service in the pipeline, each change with its check date, the cycle timed against the baseline.
Explore Operation →Executive Workshop
Three hours, ten people at most from business development, engineering and delivery, one problem agreed before a single timeline is pulled. €5,000, credited in full against a Diagnosis or an Operation booked within 30 days.
Explore the Workshop → FAQ
Before you assume the timeline is fixed.
Our deals run for years, can a two-month Diagnosis capture that?
It reads the process that produces the long deal, not one deal from bid to commissioning. Interviews and pipeline history show where the time goes long before any one project closes.
How do you handle the mix of project sales and recurring service revenue?
As two things, because they behave differently and leak differently. Running tenders and service contracts through one pipeline is often itself part of what the Diagnosis finds.
Regulation and grid connection drive our timelines, what can a Diagnosis change?
Not the regulation. What it changes is how much of the delay you can show is outside your control and how much is your own team waiting on its own handoffs. The second part tends to be bigger than anyone assumed until it is measured.
Our asset owners and operators are spread across regions, does that affect the interviews?
It shapes who is interviewed, not whether the work fits. A team spread across regions is where the cost of coordination hides, and the interview list is settled with you before anyone is booked.
Get started
Tenders and service share your people. The cost has a number.
Thirty minutes on where tenders and service contracts compete for the same engineers, and which records already show it. The call ends with a next step or with "not yet", said plainly.