What is a capability statement?

Written for a reader who is skimming

The person receiving it has a shortlist to build and a stack of documents to get through, so they are scanning for reasons to keep you rather than reading for interest. That shapes everything about the format. Put the core services in the first third of the first page, in the words the buyer uses rather than the words the industry uses. Make the past work scannable, with client type, scale and outcome on one line each. Put licences, insurances and certifications where they can be checked at a glance, with numbers and expiry dates. Anything that requires reading two paragraphs to extract a fact will not be extracted. The test is whether somebody could decide in ninety seconds, because that is roughly what they will spend.

What buyers are actually checking

Four things, in this order. Can this supplier do the specific work, evidenced by having done something similar rather than by claiming to. Are they compliant, meaning current licences, the right insurances at the right limits, and any sector certifications such as safety or quality management. Are they the right size, since a two person business and a hundred person business both fail on projects at the wrong end of their range. And can they be reached, by a named person with a direct line, which sounds trivial and eliminates more suppliers than anything else on the list. Everything else on the page is supporting material for those four judgements.

Past work, without breaching confidence

The strongest evidence is specific and most suppliers cannot name clients. The workaround is to describe the client by type and the work by scale: a regional council, twelve kilometres of rural drainage, delivered across two seasons. Value bands rather than exact figures, and outcomes rather than activities, which means naming what changed rather than what was done. Where a client will allow their name and a quote, that is worth more than three anonymised entries and is worth asking for at the end of a job while everybody is pleased. Keep three or four examples and rotate them by sector rather than listing everything, since a page of twenty projects reads as a list and two described properly read as evidence.

Compliance details that have to be current

This is the section that dates fastest and the one that disqualifies. Licence numbers with their class and expiry. Insurance policies with the type, the insured amount and the expiry, since a buyer checks whether public liability meets their threshold before anything else. Certifications with the standard and the certifying body. Registrations, including the business number and any supplier scheme membership. Put a review date on the document itself and diarise it, because a capability statement showing an insurance certificate that expired four months ago does more damage than having no document at all: it suggests nobody is watching, which is the exact opposite of the impression the page exists to create.

Tailoring, versioning and sending

Keep one master and two or three sector variants rather than a new document per opportunity. The variants change the services listed first, the past work chosen and the language, and leave the compliance section untouched. Save as a document with a version and a date in the footer, send as a fixed format file rather than something the reader has to reformat, and name the file with the business name so it survives being saved to somebody's desktop among nineteen others. Where a buyer specifies a template or a page limit, follow it exactly, since procurement teams treat non compliance with the instruction as a proxy for how a supplier will treat the specification. Send it with a short covering note naming the opportunity and the person who suggested you get in touch, because a document arriving with no context is filed and a document arriving with a reason is read.

Questions people ask