Field notes › Running the business
What mine site clients actually check before they sign
The question behind the questionnaire
Every mine site tender comes with a stack of questions about your systems, your compliance processes and your safety record. It is tempting to treat the stack as paperwork to survive. It is not. Behind every line of it sits one real question: if we build our production schedule around your crew, what is going to go wrong, and will we find out from you or from the gate?
The client has usually been burned before. A previous supplier sent someone whose induction had lapsed, or went quiet when a crew fell over mid-swing. The questionnaire is scar tissue. Which means the winning answer is rarely the best-written one. It is the one that looks least like the last supplier.
Proof beats promises
Any firm can write "we maintain a rigorous compliance process" in a tender response. Clients know this, so the sharper ones ask you to show the process rather than describe it. Walk us through how you know a worker is compliant on the day they arrive. What happens in your system if someone tries to roster a worker without the right ticket?
This is where most firms reach for a spreadsheet, and the client watches someone scroll. With Mustr the answer is a demonstration, not an essay. Every booking is checked server-side against competencies, inductions, availability and double-bookings before it is confirmed, and a failed check blocks the booking outright. You can show a blocked booking live. That single moment answers the real question, because the client can see the mistake is impossible rather than merely discouraged. The mechanics are laid out at compliance.
Expiries matter to them too, because a compliant worker in week one is not the concern. Week thirty is. Being able to show that certificates surface up to 60 days before they lapse, with reminders already going out, tells the client the wheels will not quietly fall off mid-contract.
Logistics is part of the pitch
On remote sites, getting a qualified worker is only half the job. Getting them to site, housed and back again is the other half, and clients have seen suppliers who could recruit but could not mobilise. Expect questions about how you manage flights, rooms and swing changeovers.
It helps to show that flights and accommodation are tracked on the shift itself, not in a separate spreadsheet reconciled by hand, and that the client's own site team can log in, see their roster and tick off flights and accommodation as they are confirmed. Offering that visibility in the tender is a differentiator in itself: most suppliers are offering a weekly email.
The questions about your systems and data
Larger clients increasingly put IT and data questions in front of suppliers, and labour hire firms are often unprepared for them. Where is our workers' data hosted? Who can log in? What happens if your systems go down the week before shutdown?
Have plain answers ready. Mustr is hosted in Australia with data kept onshore, every login requires 2FA, access is invite-only with no public signup, and there are daily encrypted offsite backups. You do not need to be a technology company to say those sentences, you just need software that makes them true.
Know the ground rules first
Requirements differ by state and by commodity, and licensing rules for labour hire providers are specific about who may operate and where. Do not rely on a blog post, this one included, for any of that. Check your state's labour hire licensing authority and the relevant work health and safety regulator before you tender, and make sure what you promise in a response is what your registration actually covers.
When the next tender asks how you guarantee a compliant crew on day one, book a demo and turn that answer into something you can show.