We work to avoid it, of course, but competitive tendering means working to the hardest of hard deadlines.
For just about any other deadline in business, you can slip it, look bad, take a financial hit, have a difficult conversation with the client, whatever. Tender submission deadlines don't slip and if you miss one, that's it. 0%. Fail. Boom. Done. Potentially months or even years of work, most of which is pretty much non-reusable, down the crapper.
So yeah. Late and all-night sessions happen.
OTOH, we do the work hard/play hard thing. So what goes around comes around, and is often beer-shaped.
For just about any other deadline in business, you can slip it, look bad, take a financial hit, have a difficult conversation with the client, whatever. Tender submission deadlines don't slip and if you miss one, that's it. 0%. Fail. Boom. Done. Potentially months or even years of work, most of which is pretty much non-reusable, down the crapper.
So yeah. Late and all-night sessions happen.
OTOH, we do the work hard/play hard thing. So what goes around comes around, and is often beer-shaped.