Responding to bid invitations and RFPs

An email lands at 4pm on a Tuesday. Fourteen attached PDFs, a bid date nine days out, a line asking you to confirm your intent to bid, and no clue whether you are one of three subs on this list or one of fifteen.

The real decision in bid work is not "how do I write a good bid." It is which invitations you answer at all, and how you keep the ones you answer from being thrown out on a technicality.

First, find out what kind of solicitation this is

How the award gets decided changes how you spend your time.

• Invitation to bid (ITB or IFB). Scope is drawn and specified, and award goes to the lowest responsive and responsible bidder — responsive means your paperwork obeyed the instructions, responsible means you are qualified to perform. Most public work runs this way. Price decides; there are no points for a nice cover letter.
• Request for proposal (RFP). Scored on more than price: approach, schedule, key people, past projects, sometimes an interview. The RFP names the criteria and often the weightings, so the written narrative is real work.
• Request for qualifications (RFQ or SOQ). No price yet — you are asking to be allowed to bid later, and usually for an hour's work.

Whether the invite came through a GC's estimating platform, an agency procurement portal or SAM.gov, pull five dates out before you open a drawing: the mandatory pre-bid walk, the question deadline, the last date addenda will be issued, the bid due date and time, and how long your price has to stay open afterward.

The ten-minute go/no-go

Answer these before the takeoff, not after:

• Do you know who sent it? A named PM who has used you is a different invitation from a "Dear Contractor" plan-room blast. Ask how many subs are bidding your scope; some GCs will tell you.
• Is the whole scope yours? If a spec section covers a trade you would sub out at a guess, you are not bidding, you are gambling.
• Do you meet the insurance and bonding requirements today? Not "could you get there" — do your current limits and bond line clear the exhibit as written?
• Is it prevailing wage? Some federally funded construction work is covered by Davis-Bacon requirements, and state or local work can carry its own rules. Read the solicitation's wage determination and payroll instructions; price from those documents rather than your usual labor rate.
• Can your backlog take the schedule? Watch for liquidated damages per day and a start date landing on work you already sold.
• How do you get paid? Retainage, pay-when-paid language and 60 to 90 day terms all cost you float. Price them or pass.

A fast, polite no is worth sending. Reply the same day, say why in one line, and ask to stay on the list.

What one bid costs, and what your hit rate does to that

Bidding is unpaid overhead, so it needs a number. A mid-size commercial bid, honestly logged:

Fourteen hours at $75 an hour is about $1,050 per bid. That is the cheap part. The expensive part is how many you lose:

Every one of those percentages comes back out of the jobs you win. Bidding everything does not raise revenue; it quietly raises the overhead inside your prices. Run it with your own hours and rate — the shape matters more than these figures.

The paperwork with a lead time

Half of what a bid needs comes from someone who does not work for you. Start those the day you decide to bid.

Two of those decide bids on their own. The insurance exhibit names exact limits and exact endorsement wording, and no agent invents an additional insured endorsement on a Friday afternoon. A bid bond is only available through a surety arrangement, with the solicitation setting its amount and form. Read the bonding section first. Federal construction can trigger Miller Act bond requirements, while states set their own public-work rules; confirm the applicable requirement in the solicitation and with your surety.

Your safety record gets screened too. Some owners and GCs will not prequalify a sub whose experience modification rate is above 1.0.

Ask your questions inside the window

Solicitations set a deadline for questions, usually a week or so before the bid date, and answers come back to every bidder as a written addendum. That is the only mechanism; a call to the PM the night before gets you nothing the owner is bound by.

So read the file early enough to have questions, and ask about the gaps that move your price: which trade owns the penetrations, whether existing conditions were surveyed, what the allowance covers, whether that named manufacturer is available to you at all. Then acknowledge every addendum on the bid form.

Where bids get thrown out before price is compared

On public work, "responsive" is checked before any price is compared, and the failures are almost always clerical:

• Late. Public bid openings have no grace period; two minutes past the stated time and the envelope comes back unopened.
• Missing addendum acknowledgment, or the wrong revision of the bid form.
• No bid bond, or a bond for the wrong amount.
• Missing attachments: non-collusion affidavit, DBE or MBE forms, subcontractor listing, license number where the state requires it on the bid itself.
• Blank unit prices or unpriced alternates. An empty line reads as incomplete, not as zero.

One nuance worth getting right. On private GC work, a scope letter listing inclusions and exclusions is standard practice and protects you later. On a public hard bid, qualifying your bid that way can make it non-responsive. Same letter, opposite outcome — follow the instructions to bidders in front of you.

Turning the takeoff into something you can send

Most of those fourteen hours are takeoff and phone calls, but assembly is what eats the evening before a deadline. That is where your own priced line items pay: you describe the scope, pull the assemblies and unit prices you already built, and spend what is left on the parts of this job that are genuinely different. DoneQuote is where that catalog lives, so the numbers you worked out go out the way you worked them out, and you keep a copy of what you submitted for when the results come back.

Losing is the normal outcome

Most bids lose. Five bidders means four go home — arithmetic, not a verdict on your pricing. Contractors quit hard-bid work because a string of losses reads like something is broken, when it is what the math predicts.

Watch your hit rate per source instead. Log every bid: who invited you, the scope, hours spent, your number, the outcome. After twenty or thirty entries you can see which GCs and agencies actually award to you, and those are the invitations worth fourteen hours next time.

Public bid results are public, so request the tabulation and read the spread. Three percent off says keep bidding that owner. Thirty percent off usually means you read the scope differently from everyone else, and that is worth an hour to understand before the next invitation from the same office.