I used to spend FYQ1 easing back in after EOFY. Now I spend it finding the pipeline gaps nobody's looked at yet.

The best bid I ever worked on didn't start with a brief. It started much earlier, in a quiet planning session nobody made a big deal of.

I've seen the same pattern play out too many times. A team wraps up EOFY, takes a breather, and doesn't really look up again until FYQ2 or FYQ3. By then the opportunities that would have shaped their year are already moving without them.

FYQ1 is when I'd make time for a proper bid strategy review, and honestly it comes down to two things.

You're sitting on a full year of data.

Wins, losses, near-misses, debrief feedback that's probably still buried in someone's inbox from last financial year. Most of it never gets looked at properly. A FYQ1 review is where you go back through it and ask why things landed the way they did, not just tally up the scoreboard.

You've still got runway.

Refresh your win themes now and they're ready well before your next big submission. Leave it until FYQ3 and you're fixing things under deadline pressure instead of with a clear head.

Worth asking yourself now: what are you actually pursuing this financial year, and what should you be walking away from? A disciplined bid/no-bid process saves people from burning out on bids they were never going to win.

That freed-up time is also where the real groundwork happens: strategic conversations, desktop research on clients you're expecting RFTs from, and pre-positioning sessions to get a read on what the next opportunity will actually look like. It's also when your design team can get ahead, sourcing imagery/assets, testing visual directions, and flagging early if a bid is likely to need a photo shoot, animation or video.

If you'd like to talk through what this could look like for your team, we can help.Get in touch