Bid day: four of your six suppliers never sent a number

Your bid is due Thursday at 2:00.

Monday you emailed the drawings to six companies. By Wednesday night you have two numbers. One supplier replied asking which spec section you meant and you have not answered yet. One sent a quote for the wrong building. Two have said nothing at all.

So you carry your own number on the packages that never came back, submit, and find out at buyout whether you were high or low. Usually the answer is “low on the one nobody quoted” — because the item nobody quoted is the item that was hard to quote.

This is not a discipline problem on your end. Most estimators in commercial construction have run this same Wednesday night. But most of what goes wrong is fixable, and almost none of it is about the price.

Why a quote does not come back

Put yourself on the other side. A distributor’s inside salesperson may open a dozen invitations in a week. Yours is competing with the other ten for the same hour, and it loses on any of these.

They could not open the drawings. A share link that expired, a folder that needs an account, a forty-file dump with no sheet list. If the first click fails, there is no second click.

They did not know what to price. You sent the whole set. Your scope is three sheets of it and two spec sections. An estimator who has to work out what you want will do the job that already told them.

There was no due date, or the due date was yours. “ASAP” produces nothing. Your own due date produces a number that arrives after you have submitted.

They had one question and nowhere to put it. They replied to your email. Your email is the one with four hundred unread messages in it this week.

Nobody reminded them. Not because reminders are magic, but because a quote request that lands on a Monday and is never mentioned again looks, by Wednesday, like it was not important.

They were never going to bid and did not say so. The silence you read as “still working on it” was a pass on day one. This is the most expensive one, because it costs you the days you could have spent finding somebody else.

The number that tells you whether you are safe

Not “how many invitations did I send.” Coverage, by package.

Break your scope into the pieces you actually buy — material, specialty fabrication, the lower-tier work you sublet, equipment rental, freight. For each one, at 48 hours out, you want at least two live numbers. Then your bid day looks like this:

• Packages with two or more numbers: done. Compare and move on.
• Packages with exactly one number: you are negotiating against yourself. Decide now whether that is acceptable, consciously.
• Packages with zero: this is the list. It is usually short, and it is the only list worth working on Wednesday.

Most estimators chase everybody on Wednesday because they cannot see who has answered. The whole value of tracking invitations is that it turns “chase everyone” into “chase these two”, which is a job that fits in the time you have.

What a bid invitation owes its recipient

Six things. None of them are a template.

1. Drawings they can open in one click, with the sheets you care about identified. Not a share link to your whole plan folder.
2. Scope in your own words. What is in, what is out, what you are assuming they include. One short paragraph beats a spec reference, because the spec reference means they have to go read it.
3. A due date and a time, set earlier than yours. A day earlier is the minimum. Two is better, because a number that arrives at 1:40 for a 2:00 bid cannot be checked.
4. A one-click way to decline. You want the pass on Monday. Make it easier to tell you no than to ignore you.
5. Somewhere to ask a question that is not your inbox, and an answer that comes back on the record. The question one supplier asks is usually the ambiguity in your own scope, which means it is worth answering once, carefully.
6. A way to revise. The number that arrives at 9am and the corrected number that arrives at 1pm are the same bid. If your process cannot hold both, you will price the wrong one.

In SubMark: Invite to Bid, and what it does not do

Our product page describes it in one line: Send bid packets to your subs and suppliers by link — no login for them. Their questions and quotes come back in one place, side by side. It is off until you switch it on in settings. Here is the mechanical detail behind that, because the details are the part that decides whether it works on a Wednesday.

The recipient has no account and never needs one. You pick a company from your directory and send the invite. It goes to the contacts you pick at that company, or to the company’s own address if you pick none. What they get is a link. The link is good for 90 days, because an invitation is something a recipient comes back to — the plans, the due date, their own last number — for as long as the pursuit is live. You can revoke a link, which is the lever that matters once a URL has been forwarded to somebody you did not invite.

What they see. The project, the scope note you wrote for them, the due date, your plan files — each one downloadable on its own, as individual sheet PDFs, or as the whole set in one zip. If the due date has passed, the packet says so. It does not lock them out: a late number still reaches you, dated, which is the honest behavior. You would rather have it and know.

What they can do. Say we will bid or we are passing, with their name and a note. Upload a quote with an amount and a file. Ask a question.

What you see. One panel per bid: who was invited, who answered, who has not, the numbers that have come in side by side, and the questions with the unanswered ones counted. A resend sends a fresh link on the same invitation and leaves the first one working, so a recipient sitting on the first email is not locked out by your follow-up. Every quote is a version — a supplier who fixes a typo at 4pm gets v2, v1 is still there, and the record says which one counts.

The reminders, exactly. Once you switch reminders on (they are off by default, separately from Invite to Bid itself), a daily job emails any invite with no quote yet at seven days before the bid’s due date and again at two days before. It skips anyone who already said they are passing, because chasing a person who answered you is how your mail ends up in a spam folder. It needs a due date on the bid — no due date, no reminder.

Who can do it. The same permission that lets somebody add and edit bids. Questions are answered by your office, and the answer is emailed back to the person who asked, with their link in it.

Now the limits, plainly:

• There is no bid leveling. The quotes come back as amounts and files, side by side. Deciding whether two numbers cover the same scope is a person reading two proposals. Nothing normalizes them for you.
• An answered question does not broadcast. If a supplier’s question reveals a gap in your scope, telling the other five is your job — which is a reason to re-read your scope note the moment the first question arrives.
• A quote does not become a purchase order. When you win and buy out, you write the PO. See the PO process for subs for what that record does for you afterwards.
• There is no public bid board for suppliers to browse. Invitations are one company at a time, by name, which is what you want for pricing you plan to rely on.

Four habits worth more than the tooling

Write the exclusions, not just the inclusions. “Freight and offload by others” in your invitation prevents the most common buyout argument there is. Our page on reading a subcontract before signing makes the same argument one tier up: the gap between two scopes is where the money goes.

Ask for unit prices on anything quantity-driven. A lump sum you cannot take apart is a lump sum you cannot adjust when the quantity changes, and the quantity always changes.

Ask how long the price holds. On commodity-driven material a quote with no validity period is not a price, it is an opinion. Thirty days, in writing, and if the job awards in May on a February number, you are in the conversation our article on material price increases is about. Quote validity, escalation clauses and supplier terms vary, and what your subcontract and their quote say governs; nothing here is legal advice.

Keep the declines. A company that passed on a school in March because they were loaded is a company to call first in July. The pass is information. Most estimators throw it away.

The Wednesday that is actually fine

The point of all of this is not a tidier process. It is that at 4pm on Wednesday you can answer one question in ten seconds: which packages have no number?

If the answer is “none”, you are bidding your own number on nothing, and your buyout will look like your estimate. If the answer is three packages, you still have Thursday morning — and you knew it on Wednesday, which is the only version of this story where anybody can do something about it.

See how SubMark helps you win work, or what it costs.