Which tenders should you not price at all?
Scoring a bid list is not about picking a winner, it is about deciding what not to price. Five sites, five criteria drawn from your own win and loss record, and a bar that two of them do not clear.
Construction Starter Weighted Scoring Pro engine
After you install, this is the model to open.
Score the Sites Before You Bid
- In your spreadsheet, click the Sortia icon in the strip of icons down the right-hand edge. No strip? Click the arrow at the bottom-right to open it. You can also use Extensions, then Sortia, then Open Sortia.
- Click Start from a template and put that name in the search box.
- Pick the card with that name and click Load this template. It arrives on a new tab with real numbers already in it.
This one runs on a Pro engine, and every free install includes five full-quality runs on your own numbers, shared across all five Pro engines rather than five for each. After that, Pro is $199/year.
The answer
- Price these
- 3 of 5 Marsh Lane 78, Kingsway Depot 77, Eastgate Retail 73
- Walk away
- 58 and 60 Riverside Phase 2 and Harbour Works, under the 70 line
- The top two
- 78 vs 77 one point apart: too close for a matrix to settle alone
Five tenders and enough estimating time to price three properly. This scorecard is not trying to pick a winner, it is trying to decide what not to price, and the consideration threshold in the settings is doing that job. The five criteria are not a wish list: they are the five things that separated the jobs you won from the jobs you lost in the last two years of the tender log, which is also where the maxima come from.
Click Run. Marsh Lane leads on 78, Kingsway Depot is on 77, Eastgate Retail on 73, Harbour Works on 60 and Riverside Phase 2 on 58. Three sites clear the 70-point bar and two do not, and those two are the answer. At roughly $18,000 of estimating and pre-construction time a full bid, not pricing them is worth about $36,000 before anyone opens a drawing.
Look at why Riverside fails, because it is the one that would otherwise have been priced. It scores 24 out of 25 on work of this type, the highest score any site gets on any row, and it still comes last, because a job you know how to build for a client who pays late, against a crowded bid list, with a programme that collides with your existing work, is a job you will price carefully and lose.
The score is doing exactly what it should: refusing to let one strong row carry a weak site. At the top the report flags Marsh Lane and Kingsway as too close to call, and that is correct rather than unhelpful. One point on a hundred-point scale is inside the noise of anybody scoring. The sensitivity table shows what would settle it: distance from our yard carries 15% of the weight today, and lowering that to 11.7% hands first place to Kingsway.
If your yard is moving, or if you have just taken a lease on a compound near Kingsway, that weight is wrong and the order is wrong with it. In practice you bid both of them, which is what the bar was for. Points mode is deliberate here rather than ranks: it holds every score between zero and that row's maximum and stops the run naming the cell if one is over, which is the error that quietly turns a scorecard into fiction.
To make it yours, replace the criteria with the ones your own tender log says predict a win, set each maximum by how much that row actually mattered, score every site from zero up to that maximum, and put the bar where your estimating capacity runs out rather than where it feels right.
The model
It arrives on a tab called Template: Score the Sites, carrying these columns:
- Criterion
- Max points
- Marsh Lane (points)
- Kingsway Depot (points)
- Riverside Phase 2 (points)
- Eastgate Retail (points)
- Harbour Works (points)
Once it is in your sheet
- The model arrives with real numbers in it and runs as it stands, so you can press the button first and understand it second.
- Change the numbers to yours. The sheet marks which cells are inputs and which hold formulas, and most labels carry a note explaining the row.
- Press the run button at the bottom of the panel. It is labeled for the tool you are in, and the result lands on its own tab, with a written reading of it beside the figures.
Never used Google Sheets? Start here goes the whole way, in seven steps, and assumes nothing.
Next question
- Do rain days really cost you money?What Moves With Cost on This Job?
- Is one estimator quietly pricing higher than the other?Do Our Two Estimators Price the Same Job the Same Way?
- What will a tonne of steel cost you next month?Where Is This Material Price Going?
- How much contingency does the job need before the budget holds nine times in ten?What contingency gives 90% odds of staying under budget?
- What happens to the reserve when costs rise together?Will the Contingency Last?
- Which finish date can you put in the contract?The P80 Construction Schedule
Every model like this one, and the method behind them: Decision trees.