Built for certified Australian businesses

About this book

Queensland is about to spend $116 billion. Most builders won't see a cent of it — and not because they can't do the work.

There has never been more construction work coming to Queensland: roads, rail, hospitals, schools, and seventeen venues for the 2032 Games. The capability to build it already exists, spread across thousands of small trade and construction businesses. And most of them will be locked out — not by skill, but by a gate almost nobody explains until you're standing at it, shut out, watching the job go to someone no better than you.

That gate is prequalification. Before a prime contractor can let you near their work, you have to prove — on paper, before you lift a tool — that you have the quality systems, the safety and environmental systems, the financial capacity, and the insurances and licences they demand. Get it wrong and you're not bidding. You're reading about the job afterwards.

Prequalified is the map through that gate.

Written by Paul Morffew — who has led quality on multi-billion-dollar capital programs and spent years as an ISO 9001 Lead Auditor and NATA assessor, on the other side of the table deciding who passes — this is the plain-English playbook nobody handed you. Inside:

• The four pillars every buyer checks, and what they're really asking for
• A lean quality system that gets you through without drowning in paperwork
• The financial ratios that disqualify good businesses before they start — and how to read them
• The one entity mistake that turns a simple claim into an expensive fight
• How to get found by the primes before the work is ever advertised
• A 90-day plan to go from invisible to prequalified, profiled, and in front of the buyers who hold the work

The gate is administrative, not technical. It's lower than it looks — once someone shows you what's on the other side.

If you're tired of watching contracts go to outfits no better than you, just better organised, this is your way in.