The bid/no-bid decision

The expensive mistake in government contracting is not losing. It is bidding on things you were never going to win.

A serious proposal costs a small company somewhere between twenty and two hundred hours of the time of its most capable people — usually the founder, the technical lead, and whoever writes well. That time comes directly out of delivery, sales, or sleep. Spent on the wrong opportunity, it is gone with nothing to show for it, and worse, it crowds out the opportunity you could have won.

A company that bids forty times a year at a 5% win rate wins two contracts and is exhausted. A company that bids ten times a year at 20% wins two contracts and has thirty proposals' worth of capacity left for delivery and relationship-building. The second company is not luckier. It is more selective.

The uncomfortable question

Before any framework: when did you first hear about this opportunity?

If the answer is "when the solicitation was published," your position is structurally weak. Not hopeless, but weak. Federal procurements have a long pre-solicitation life — market research, sources sought notices, industry days, draft RFPs, one-on-one meetings. Competitors who engaged during that period have shaped their proposal around information you do not have, and sometimes shaped the requirement itself.

This is not corruption; it is how acquisition is designed to work. Market research is a mandated part of the process. But it means the RFP is the end of the competition's information phase, not the beginning.

The practical implication: a portion of your effort should always go into the pre-solicitation window, and an opportunity you first met on its publication date should have to clear a higher bar than one you have been tracking for six months.

The scoring framework

Score each factor 1 to 5. Weight them. Set your threshold before you look at the opportunity, and then let the number decide.

1. Capability fit (weight ×3)

Can you actually perform this work, today, with people you have or can definitely hire?

• 5 — Core business. You have done this exact work repeatedly.
• 3 — Adjacent. You would be learning on the contract.
• 1 — A stretch you are rationalising.

Be honest at the low end. The most common self-deception in bid/no-bid is scoring a 2 as a 4 because the opportunity is attractive.

2. Past performance relevance (weight ×3)

Not "do you have past performance" but "do you have past performance the evaluators will consider relevant" — which Section M usually defines in terms of size, scope and complexity.

• 5 — Multiple citable contracts of similar size, scope and complexity, ideally federal.
• 3 — Relevant work at a smaller scale, or commercial/state-local work you can map to the criteria.
• 1 — Nothing an evaluator would score as relevant.

If you are at 1 here and past performance is heavily weighted, that is usually a no-bid regardless of everything else. Read building past performance for the ways out of that position.

3. Relationship and intelligence (weight ×2)

Do you know this customer, and do you know things about this requirement that are not in the RFP?

• 5 — Ongoing relationship, engaged during market research, know the pain point behind the requirement.
• 3 — Some contact. Attended an industry day. Know the incumbent's reputation.
• 1 — Cold. Everything you know is in the document.

4. Competitive position (weight ×2)

Who else is bidding, and is there an incumbent?

Award data is public — look up who currently holds this work and who has won similar work in your codes. Incumbents win recompetes far more often than challengers expect, because they have performance history, transition risk on their side, and accurate pricing knowledge.

• 5 — No incumbent (new requirement), or an incumbent with known performance problems.
• 3 — Incumbent present, competition open, you have a real differentiator.
• 1 — Entrenched incumbent, and your differentiator is "we would try harder."

Search recent awards in your NAICS codes to establish this rather than guessing.

5. Price competitiveness (weight ×2, ×4 if LPTA)

Can you win at a price you can perform at profitably?

If Section M says lowest price technically acceptable, this factor dominates everything. Your beautiful technical approach earns zero. Weight it ×4 and let it veto.

• 5 — Structural cost advantage: low overhead, existing staff, existing location, favourable labour category mapping.
• 3 — Competitive but not advantaged.
• 1 — You would be pricing to lose or performing at a loss.

6. Capacity and timing (weight ×2)

Can you write this proposal and keep delivering, and can you perform if you win?

• 5 — Clear runway, deadline is comfortable, delivery capacity available.
• 3 — Tight but manageable.
• 1 — You would be sacrificing existing work, or you could not staff the win.

Winning a contract you cannot staff is worse than losing it. Performance problems follow you into CPARS and every future evaluation.

Scoring

Maximum is 70 (or 80 with the LPTA weighting). Suggested thresholds for a small company:

• Above 55 — bid, and put real effort in.
• 45–55 — bid only if you have capacity to spare, or if there is a strategic reason (new agency relationship, a code you want history in).
• Below 45 — no-bid. Write it down. Move on.

The number's purpose is not precision. It is to make the decision before you have fallen in love with the opportunity, using criteria you set when you were being rational.

Signals that an opportunity is effectively wired

Some solicitations have a preferred outcome. This is often entirely legitimate — a requirement genuinely shaped around what the government learned during market research, which the incumbent influenced by doing the work well. It is still a reason not to spend eighty hours.

Watch for:

• A very short response window on a substantial requirement. Two weeks for a complex proposal usually means the government expects offerors who are already prepared.
• Requirements written to a specific product or configuration with no meaningful equivalency language.
• Experience requirements that match one company's history suspiciously well — a specific number of years doing a specific thing at a specific type of facility.
• No sources sought notice, no industry day, no draft RFP on a large requirement.
• Vague requirements plus heavy weighting on "understanding of the environment." This favours whoever already works there.

Any one of these is not conclusive. Three of them together mean the expected value of your proposal hours is low.

Track your decisions

Keep a simple record: opportunity, score, bid or no-bid, outcome. After a year you will know two things worth more than any framework — your actual win rate at each score band, and whether your scoring is honest. Most people discover their capability-fit scores were consistently one point optimistic, and adjust.

The no-bids matter too. If you no-bid something and it is awarded to a company much like yours at a price you could have beaten, your threshold is too high. That is a real and correctable error, and you will only see it if you wrote the decision down.

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ContractBeam aggregates public federal opportunity data. This guide is general business advice, not legal or acquisition advice. Nothing here should be read as suggesting any particular procurement is improper — narrow requirements usually reflect legitimate market research.