Federal Bidding, Written Down

Most bid/no-bid calls are made on a deadline and a feeling. Here is the framework — twelve checks, in the order that saves the most time.

A free analyser is only useful if it scores against your company, runs on live SAM.gov data, and shows its reasoning. Here is the bar.

Solicitation packages run to hundreds of pages. There is a reading order that gets you to a decision without reading all of it.

Most takeoff errors are not measurement errors. They are scope and assumption errors, and they show up in the same few places.

Four quotes for the same package are rarely for the same scope. Leveling is the work of making them comparable before you pick one.

“Can we bond it?” is the wrong question on its own. The one that matters is what bonding it costs you in opportunities you have not seen yet.

8(a), HUBZone, SDVOSB, WOSB and small business — what each one actually gates, and why “small” depends on the solicitation.

Federal bidding breaks at the handoffs, not the stages. One project that carries Go/No-Go, AI document analysis, takeoff, estimation and the proposal is the time saving.

The proposal is graded against Section M, not against how good your company is. Write to the scoring, in the order the evaluator reads.

Reading, extracting and comparing — the parts of preconstruction that are volume work. Not judgement, and not pricing.