The most expensive habit in estimating isn't mispricing labour — it's pricing tenders you were never going to win, or never should have wanted. Every bid consumes your scarcest resource, estimating hours, and most shops can genuinely pursue only a fraction of what lands in the inbox. The bid/no-bid call is therefore a real decision with real money attached, and it deserves better than "looks decent, let's price it."
It doesn't, however, deserve a committee. Twenty minutes, four passes, one honest piece of arithmetic. Set a timer — the discipline of the clock is half the method, because an unbounded "quick look" becomes an evening, and now you've invested enough to feel committed. That's sunk-cost bidding, and it's how shops end up pricing everything and winning the wrong things.
Minutes 0–5: Division 00 — the terms you'd be signing
Start where the deal-breakers live, because a deal-breaker at minute three saves seventeen minutes:
- Bid date and validity period. Can you actually deliver a number by then, and can you hold it for the stated validity?
- Bid security and bonding. Bid bond percentage, consent of surety, performance/L&M bonds on award. If your bonding capacity is tied up, this answers itself.
- Prequalification. Is this an open call or a closed list you're not on? (You'd be surprised.)
- Supplementary conditions. Skim for the punitive outliers: liquidated damages that dwarf the job's margin, onerous payment terms, unusual warranty durations, hard "no qualification" language. You're not analyzing — you're looking for anything you'd refuse to sign at any price.
Minutes 5–10: your sections — is your work actually here?
Pull the table of contents and the scope-of-work document if one is issued. Three questions:
- Do your spec sections exist, and how thick are they? A two-page section on your trade suggests either a small scope or a spec that leans on drawings — both change your effort estimate.
- Is there an owner's-standard oddity? A facility owner's in-house spec, a non-MasterFormat structure, a French-only package when your office reads English — none of these are no-bids on their own, but each adds hours, and hours are what you're budgeting.
- Any scope-boundary red flags? Work your trade sometimes owns and sometimes doesn't (the classic disputes: who grouts base plates, who owns dowels, who tests moisture). If the documents are vague where the money is, note it — vague boundaries mean either RFI time or risk.
Minutes 10–15: the drawings — how hard is your scope, really?
Open your discipline's sheets plus the architecturals, and just look: repetitive floor plates or sixty unique conditions? Generous laydown or a zero-lot-line downtown site? Phasing notes, occupied-facility notes, night-work notes? You're estimating the estimate here — a repetitive job might take a day of takeoff, a fussy one a week — and simultaneously sampling the design quality. Drawings full of contradictions at minute twelve will be full of contradictions in week three, priced into everyone's number as risk.
Minutes 15–20: the arithmetic nobody writes down
Now the honest part. The expected value of bidding is roughly:
(probability of winning) × (expected margin) − (cost to bid) — and the cost to bid is real: your hours, at what those hours could earn pricing something else.
You can't compute the probability precisely; you can be honest about its ingredients:
| Factor | The honest question |
|---|---|
| The client | Have they awarded you work before? Do they shop your number? Do they pay? |
| The competition | How many bidders? A public opening with nine names is a different game than an invited three |
| The fit | Is this the work your crews are genuinely good at, in your geography, at your size? |
| Your capacity | If you win it, can you staff it — and what does bidding it displace this month? |
| The risk terms | Whatever minute 4 turned up: LDs, payment terms, hold periods |
Most no-bids, honestly reached, are capacity decisions — the tender is fine, but it displaces something better. That's a good no-bid. The bad no-bid is the one made by default, because the package sat unopened until there wasn't time left to price it properly — which is just a bid/no-bid decision made by procrastination instead of judgment.
Two disciplines that make the method stick
- Write the reason down. One line per no-bid: "declined — bonding tied up on 26-armoury" / "declined — nine bidders, no client history." Six months of these lines is a picture of your market that no gut feeling matches — including which clients you always decline and should maybe stop pretending you'll ever bid.
- Tell the inviter. A prompt, polite decline keeps you on the list for the next one. Silence gets you quietly dropped from the invitations you did want.
And if the read says bid: the twenty minutes weren't overhead. You now know the terms, the scope shape, the drawing quality and the risk list — which is precisely the briefing the actual estimate starts from.