She is not evaluating you. She is looking for a reason to cross you off.

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17 August 2026 · Aston Gapes · about 5 minutes
Part of Get the enquiry

A procurement officer has three quotes on her desk for a two-hundred-thousand-dollar machine. The prices are close enough that price is not going to decide it.

So she does what everybody does. She types each company's name into Google and spends about four minutes on each of them, looking for a reason to cross one off.

She is not evaluating you. She is looking for a reason to eliminate you, because eliminating one makes her afternoon shorter and her decision defensible.

What she is actually looking for

Not your values. Not your mission. She is answering one question with several parts: if this goes wrong in eighteen months, is there a real company here that will answer the phone.

So she looks for an address that is a place rather than a post office box. A landline as well as a mobile. An ABN. The name of a person, ideally more than one, ideally with a photograph that is obviously them and not a stock photo of a man in a hard hat pointing at something. Accreditations, memberships, insurances. Evidence of work at a scale like hers.

None of that is glamorous, and all of it is the difference between a shortlist of three and a shortlist of two.

The things that quietly fail this test

A contact page with only a form. No address, no phone. To you that is clean. To somebody about to commit two hundred thousand dollars, it reads as a business that does not want to be found.

A Gmail or Hotmail address. Still remarkably common, and it is read exactly the way you would read it on a quote you received.

Stock photography. Not neutral. Actively negative, because everybody can now spot it, and the inference is that there was nothing real worth photographing.

No people anywhere. A technical sale is a relationship with an engineer who will pick up when something goes wrong. A site with no human being on it is asking a buyer to take that on trust.

A copyright notice that says 2019. Tiny, and it is the single fastest way to make somebody wonder whether you are still trading.

The strange thing about all of this

Every item on that list describes something you already have. You have an address, a landline, an ABN, insurances, thirty years of work and a workshop full of people who know what they are doing.

It is all true and none of it is on the page. That is a fundamentally different problem from not being good enough, and it is a great deal cheaper to fix.

The businesses that struggle with this are usually the ones who find it distasteful to talk about themselves, which is a decent instinct that is costing them work.

Four minutes, on yourself

Open your own site the way she would, with fresh eyes, and try to eliminate your own company. Look for the address, the landline, the ABN, a real person's name, a real photograph, and something that proves you have done a job this size before.

Whatever you cannot find in four minutes, she did not find either. She just did not tell you, because she had two other quotes and one of them had an address.